“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 ...

Vote margin calculated based on the two-party vote, which uses just the Democratic and Republican vote totals. Together, the share of the statewide vote and the benchmark margins produce a 50-50 tie, ...

Kenny Michelena is, by just about any measure, a tough guy. He was born and raised on a ranch in rural northwestern Wyoming and remembers that after class in elementary school, the bus driver would ...

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 ...

Since Donald Trump effectively wrapped up the Republican nomination this month, I’ve seen a lot of critical self-assessments from empirically minded journalists — FiveThirtyEight included, twice over ...

This story was originally published May 31, 2013. Once again, two U.S. teams, the Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning, are headed to the Stanley Cup finals. The N.H.L.’s conference finals will ...

If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately. Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were ...

For James Harmoush of Colorado, none of the census boxes quite fit. In 2010 and 2020, when the census asked him to select a box regarding his race, he picked “white.” But there’s one major problem ...

Averages are weighted by the square root of the number of polls that a particular pollster conducted for that particular type of election in that particular cycle. Polls that are banned by ...

The United States is changing rapidly. The oldest baby boomers are into their retirement years, and the median age of the U.S. population is climbing. At the same time, each generation is more ...

There is no shortage of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry. Response rates to political polls are dismal. Even polls that make every effort to contact a representative sample of ...

This is the 11th and final article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.