32 Facts About FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, is an American website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States.

In July 2013, ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight, hiring Silver as editor-in-chief and a contributor for ESPN.

Since then, the FiveThirtyEight blog has covered a broad spectrum of subjects including politics, sports, science, economics, and popular culture.

The site and its founder are best known for election forecasts, including the 2012 presidential election in which FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the vote winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The name FiveThirtyEight derives from the 538 electors in the United States Electoral College.

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FiveThirtyEight gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic party primaries on May 6,2008.

FiveThirtyEight posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data.

FiveThirtyEight weighs pollsters' historical track records through a complex methodology and assigns them values to indicate "Pollster-Introduced Error".

FiveThirtyEight carried this approach one step further by factoring national polling trends into the estimates for a given state.

FiveThirtyEight's projected national popular vote differential was below the actual figure of 7.

FiveThirtyEight developed a list of 2010 Senate races in which he made monthly updates of predicted party turnover.

FiveThirtyEight wrote a series of columns investigating the credibility of polls by Georgia-based firm Strategic Vision, LLC According to Silver's analysis, Strategic Vision's data displayed statistical anomalies that were inconsistent with random polling.

FiveThirtyEight devoted more than a dozen articles to the Iranian presidential election in June 2009, assessing of the quality of the vote counting.

FiveThirtyEight covered the November 3,2009, elections in the United States in detail.

In spring of 2010, FiveThirtyEight turned a focus on the United Kingdom general election scheduled for May 6, with a series of more than forty articles on the subject that culminated in projections of the number of seats that the three major parties were expected to win.

The UK election was the first time the FiveThirtyEight team did an election night 'liveblog' of a non-US election.

On June 6,2010, FiveThirtyEight posted pollster rankings that updated and elaborated Silver's efforts from the 2008 election.

FiveThirtyEight noted that in the case of Research 2000 there were some discrepancies between what Silver reported and what the pollster itself reported.

On June 3,2010, The New York Times and Silver announced that FiveThirtyEight had formed a partnership under which the blog would be hosted by the Times for a period of three years.

In legal terms, FiveThirtyEight granted a "license" to the Times to publish the blog.

Shortly after FiveThirtyEight relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, and state Governorships.

FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves of the news stories covering Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests.

FiveThirtyEight rolled out its 2012 general election forecasting model on June 7,2012.

On September 3,2014, FiveThirtyEight introduced its forecasts for each of the 36 US Senate elections being contested that year.

FiveThirtyEight sought to apply its mathematical models to the Oscars, and produced internal predictions regarding the subject, predicting four out of six categories correctly.

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FiveThirtyEight applied two separate models to forecast the 2016 presidential primary elections – polls-only and polls-plus models.

For each contest, FiveThirtyEight produced probability distributions and average expected vote shares according to both models.

Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight – including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned – our early estimates of Trump's chances weren't based on a statistical model.

The core data employed were polls, which FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008.

FiveThirtyEight projected a much higher probability of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other pollsters, a projection which was criticized by Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post as "unskewing" too much in favor of Trump.

In early August 2020, FiveThirtyEight announced that for their 2020 general election forecast they had designed a new graphical structure.

Jasmine Mithani, visual journalist with FiveThirtyEight, said in an interview when asked about the complaints of new mascot said "I think the biggest complaint about Fivey Fox is that some people find it infantilizing, but that wasn't our intention" and that the motivation for including the character was to help make the forecast more of "a teaching tool".