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 ...

There are lots of people who try to predict the Oscars, and no strategy is foolproof — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is made up of secret voters who aren’t polled and who are ...

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, ...

I’m not that impressed by long-term projections of Democratic doom in the Senate. Mostly that’s because I’m not that impressed by long-term political projections in general. Political coalitions ...

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 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 ...

Legend has it that after leveling Carthage in the Third Punic War, Roman army generals ordered that the city’s fields be sown with salt so that they’d lie fallow for years, Roman generals not being ...

While most people perceived the economy as a more pressing concern generally, abortion was a motivating issue for a substantial number of voters. Why did election results diverge so dramatically from ...

The principles behind our House, Senate and gubernatorial forecasts should be familiar to our longtime readers. They take lots of polls, perform various types of adjustments to them, and then blend ...

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 ...

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

Sen. John McCain after casting a “no” vote on a measure to repeal parts of Obamacare. Instead, it was Arizona Sen. John McCain whose vote proved decisive. With a silent, emphatic “thumbs down” shortly ...