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

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 ...

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

Odds may not sum to 100 percent due to rounding and third-party candidates. CORRECTION (Aug. 17, 2018, 5:45 p.m.): The first name of Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin was misspelled in an earlier version ...

“The Party Decides,” the 2008 book by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, has probably been both the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election ...

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 ...

Before we get started, do me a favor and grab a pen or a pencil. Now hold it between your teeth, as if you were about to try to write with it. Don’t let your lips touch it. Sit with it, and pay ...

Election Day is finally here. Soon enough, returns will start rolling in — and we’ll have a ton of data to sift through. But what should you pay attention to? I’ve broken down the presidential and ...

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 ...

As we watch Michael Jordan vanquish each of his contemporaries in ESPN’s “The Last Dance” — which wraps up with its final two episodes on Sunday — it’s hard not to imagine the best of today’s game ...

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 ...

Longtime readers of FiveThirtyEight are probably familiar with our pollster ratings: letter grades that we assign to pollsters based on their historical accuracy and transparency. Since 2008, we have ...