Nate Silver’s website suffered because of Trump and changes in political news coverage.
Opinion | Perry Bacon, Jr. | March 7, 2025
FiveThirtyEight became famous for its “forecasts” from founder Nate Silver. But the website (where I worked from 2017 to 2021) was trying to do much more than predict presidential election results. FiveThirtyEight was an attempt to improve and reimagine journalism.
I think it succeeded — even though the website is now defunct.
ABC News, which owned FiveThirtyEight, this week laid off the site’s 15 remaining staffers. The network had already made drastic cutbacks two years ago, with Silver himself departing back then.
We are in the midst of staff reductions throughout the journalism industry. That said, ABC News is not a newspaper in a declining city in the Midwest. If the network wanted to keep the site going, it could have. This decision probably wasn’t just about money.
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Political journalism has changed in ways that have made FiveThirtyEight less essential. Silver started the website during the 2008 presidential campaign. (There are 538 votes in the electoral college.) He correctly saw a flaw in American political coverage. Journalism professors and many within the news industry had for years argued that political news was too focused on the “horse race” (who was going to win the next election) instead of policy issues. What Silver argued was that horse-race coverage, while extensive, was often quite bad. It was overly fixated on a single poll or arguing that a candidate appeared to be surging after delivering a strong speech, without any other evidence.
Averaging polls, scrutinizing demographics and voting histories of states — that all seems obvious now. It wasn’t 17 years ago.
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I will miss FiveThirtyEight. It was always a reliable source of aggregate polling data. It also provided a lot of background information about the potential bias and reliability of individual polls.
R.I.P.
FiveThirtyEight
March 7, 2008 - March 5, 2025
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[See more excerpts from the column under the cut]
In 2010, the New York Times hired Silver and starting hosting FiveThirtyEight on its website. A few years later, ESPN hired him to create a FiveThirtyEight that would cover not only politics but also sports, science and other topics with statisticians and more traditional journalists working in a combined newsroom.
The site grew in size and influence. And other news organizations started borrowing its methods, averaging polls and producing statistical models to analyze elections.
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The site often had political scientists and scholars write pieces. Fact-checking was extensive, adding to the site’s reliability and reputation.
But I knew FiveThirtyEight was in trouble when I saw not only stories similar to ours published in the Times and The Washington Post but also those larger organizations poaching our staffers.
Another factor that made the website less relevant was Trump. He made politics more about tweets, firings and other drama that the data can’t really capture.
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But for me, FiveThirtyEight staffers and its devoted fans, the site was about much more than election predictions and even Silver. It was an alternative, higher form of journalism.
It was also a lovable community of nerds, wonks and junkies. Our readers were Democratic-leaning, but they weren’t people watching MSNBC just to hear how terrible Republicans are. They wanted us to tell them if a Democratic politician was going to lose. They loved that every article seemed to involve the writer examining election results down to the county level and producing three charts to support their thesis.
Silver now has one of the most popular political Substack newsletters; former managing editor Micah Cohen is now politics editor for Apple News; reporter Anna Maria Barry-Jester has moved on to cover public health for ProPublica. But from my vantage point, FiveThirtyEight is everywhere in more subtle ways. The amount of charts and data in stories about politics in particular is much larger than it was two decades ago. The chief political analyst at the New York Times is a data whiz named Nate (Cohn) who joined the paper essentially as Silver’s replacement. If you tell someone about a poll, they will often ask whether other surveys show the same result.
There is still too much horse-race coverage. I hate when I see polls of the 2028 Democratic primary. Can we wait a minute? But FiveThirtyEight made that coverage smarter and more rigorous — creating a legacy that will endure.
