FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics and American society.

Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.

“The Party Decides,” the 2008 book by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, has probably been both the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election ...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to settle the debate over race, redistricting and representation. Instead, it started new ones. Since the act prohibits states from reducing a minority group ...

I’m not that impressed by long-term projections of Democratic doom in the Senate. Mostly that’s because I’m not that impressed by long-term political projections in general. Political coalitions ...

If you’re one of the approximately 320 million Americans who don’t live in New York City, it might seem like its Democratic mayoral primary has gotten an outsized amount of media coverage. But even I, ...

When the new Congress comes into session in January, there will be more Black Republicans serving together on Capitol Hill than at any point since 1877. The number? Five. 1 For years, Republicans have ...

With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, we’ve updated FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings for the first time since the 2016 presidential primaries. Based on how the media portrayed the polls after ...

“Can we trust election polls?” is a question that has reached a fever pitch in political junkie circles dating back to the 2016 election. One popular theory about why election polls missed in 2016 and ...

One of the ways that our forecast model seeks to make polling data more robust is by calculating and adjusting for “house effects,” which are systematic tendencies for polling firms to favor either ...

The police response to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which at least 39 law enforcement officers participated, has renewed conversation about racial bias and links to white supremacist ...

Apportionment, or the process of determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, happens like clockwork at this point. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts how ...