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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 2000, Barack Obama had just lost a congressional race and was feeling blue. So when a friend suggested that he head to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles to be among like-minded, ...

But trying to distinguish the effects of only one type of restriction, like voter ID requirements, is challenging because a new election law rarely changes only one voting provision. “The actual ...

On Friday at noon, a Category 5 political cyclone that few journalists saw coming will deposit Donald Trump atop the Capitol Building, where he’ll be sworn in as the 45th president of the United ...

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

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 ...

The U.S. House of Representatives isn’t the only chamber whose district lines are being redrawn to reflect the 2020 census. State-legislative chambers are being redistricted too — and as we’ve written ...

Well, this is a real head-scratcher — not least because if you want a list of the first and last names of Americans, you’d better have either a lot of time and money or work for the NSA. Unfortunately ...

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, ...