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Political Number Cruncher FiveThirtyEight To Be Shuttered
The polling platform has been on a downturn since founder Nate Silver left and took his trademark statistical model with him in 2023.
Seventeen years after its launch reshaped the political polling landscape, the outlet 538 is being shut down.
The last 15 or so employees of the once influential data aggregator are set to be laid off by Disney’s ABC News Group, according to a Tuesday report by the Wall Street Journal.
538’s closure is part of a round of job cuts which are expected to impact 200 employees working for Disney Entertainment Networks operations.
Founder Nate Silver addressed 538’s closure in a post on X afterwards, where he wrote, “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there.”
“They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better,” he continued. “They deserved much better.”
After beginning as a politics-focused blog under the name FiveThirtyEight, the site’s coverage would eventually expand to include sports, economic and pop culture predictions.
During its run, FiveThirtyEight partnered with The New York Times and ESPN before being moved to ABC News in 2018 and rebranded as 538.
Named for the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college, 538 is thought to have lost much of its juice when Silver left the site in 2023, taking its powerful forecasting model with him.
Silver’s special sauce seemed to have stemmed from his unique statistical equation, which he said was crafted to “balance out the polls with comparative demographic data.”
His first stab at national election predictions in 2008 correctly forecasted results for 49 out of the 50 states, in addition to all 35 winners of that cycle’s U.S. Senate races.
Though 538 had a reputation for sharp foresight, the site was criticized for underestimating President Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries.
Like many other outlets that election, 538 said its data leaned in favor of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. On the morning of the 2016 election, it predicted Clinton had a 71% chance of winning the White House.
While Clinton won the popular vote by just over 2%, Trump triumphed in electoral numbers with his 306 to 232 victory.
