In a surprise move, Disney announced Wednesday that it's shutting down FiveThirtyEight as part of sweeping layoffs affecting approximately 200 positions — about 6% of its workforce — across ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks.
Stats guru Nate Silver founded FiveThirtyEight, once the darling of the left-wing polling establishment, in 2008 before licensing it to The New York Times. ESPN later acquired it and finally transferred it to ABC News.
Silver, who departed the site amid previous Disney/ABC layoffs in 2023, feigned shock at the news. "Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538," he said in a post on X. "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. They deserved much better."
Did they, though?
What Silver conveniently fails to mention is that FiveThirtyEight's credibility took a massive hit when it made the politically motivated decision to drop Rasmussen Reports polling from its analysis a year ago, citing bogus claims of conservative bias. Rasmussen went on to be one of the most accurate pollsters of the 2024 election, while FiveThirtyEight continued its tradition of getting major election calls wrong.
2024 State Polling.
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@honestpollster) March 5, 2025
How did @FiveThirtyEight do? pic.twitter.com/5ohjM9GQRg
“It’s a good thing they are no longer relevant, because no matter how they started, or what the purpose is, they turned into a propaganda outlet that fails at its ONE job, by inserting additional bias, not removing it,” Mark Mitchell, the chief pollster of Rasmussen Reports, told PJ Media. “It’s clear their only current purpose is as a regime information gatekeeper.”
The closure will eliminate approximately 15 jobs across the news site. G. Elliott Morris, editorial director of data analytics who currently leads FiveThirtyEight, confirmed the layoffs.
As reported, everyone at 538 was laid off this morning. It's a monumental loss for the political data industry, and my heart breaks for my colleagues. There's no closer-knit group or sharper analysts of U.S. elections — I recommend them all. I'm hopeful the averages will return.
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) March 5, 2025
Than’s a shame.
ABC News insists that it plans to continue providing "best-in-class polling and political data analysis" across the network, which would be a new direction for them. Let’s face it: It'll keep pushing Democrat-friendly poll numbers while sidelining polls that don’t support the narrative it wants to push.
Predictably, journalists are lamenting FiveThirtyEight's demise.
Morris, for his part, further reacted to the news by praising the site’s data collection as “game-changing” and expressing hope that “it gets a rebirth.” He added that it “would need a modest budget for 2-3 researchers and 1-2 engineers.” He also noted that AI has “made things easier” now, but that ABC News had forbidden the data site from using it in the past.
Many journalists, meanwhile, have already been bemoaning the shuttering of the pivotal election data site. The 19th’s Grace Panetta reacted by calling it a “catastrophic loss not only for election journalism but also as an election data resource,” adding that she couldn’t “even count the number of times I've relied on 538's polling averages, redistricting trackers, etc for my reporting.”
Former FiveThirtyEight reporter Kayleigh Rogers noted that “538's open source API and all the other data we/they freely compiled and shared over the years drove so much important work across the industry,” adding that “this is going to have pretty severe ripple effects.”
What Panetta and others won't admit is that the real catastrophe was FiveThirtyEight abandoning any pretense of objectivity years ago. Good riddance to yet another failed liberal media experiment.
While sites like FiveThirtyEight cared more about pushing the narrative that its viewers wanted to hear — Kamala can win! — here at PJ Media, we're going to tell you the truth. Last year, we told you the polls were biased toward Kamala Harris, and we were right. Help us continue to report the truth about the state of our nation. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
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