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 ...

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

One hundred years after women were granted the right to vote, the U.S. has more women in political office than ever before. Yet gender has been a major theme of the 2020 campaign, as candidates, ...

Michael Thomas of the New Orleans Saints can create separation from his defenders all over the field. To try to capture the results of this game of cat and mouse between receiver and defender, we used ...

“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 ...

GERLACH, Nev. — Here in the desert, the Earth boils and stars fill the sky. By day, you can see plumes of geothermal steam rising in every direction, pouring from vents in the ground and disappearing ...

It used to be, if you wanted to see a Poweshiek skipperling butterfly, the thing to do was go out on the prairie and stare into the middle distance, like you were trying to see a sailboat buried in a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Once statistics for an NBA game have been collected, their lifespan of usefulness is only just beginning. Players rely on them to hone skill development; teams leverage them for game-planning and ...