FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight is a poll site started and initially led by Nate Silver. The name is taken from the total number of Electoral College votes available. The FiveThirtyEight website has been acquired by ABC News (owned by Disney), and Nate Silver announced his departure from it in April 2023 amid layoffs by the owner Disney at that time.

The site wrongly predicted that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump in 2016. Its predictions seem to be left-leaning and its audience is probably mostly liberal. It is most useful as a "worst-case" type of prediction, rather than as a prophetic assessment.

RealClearPolitics uses modeling that does a better job of factoring in historical inaccuracies in polling, and last-minute tendencies for undecided voters to shift in certain ways (such as against the incumbent party).

In the 2022 midterm elections, FiveThirtyEight long predicted a Democrat win of control of the U.S. Senate, and only in the last month prior to the election began to incrementally increase the chances of a GOP victory until, merely a week before the election, began to predict a Republican win. In contrast, RealClearPolitics predicted for more than a month a GOP win that FiveThirtyEight did not predict until the final week.

In the 2020 presidential election, the site used a very ugly Trump face and a handsome Biden face, and overstated that "Biden is clearly favored to win this election," by a lopsided margin of 91 to 9. In an attempt to hide its bias, it has a fox "comforting" and "encouraging" the "underdog Trump", which is not that biased as the rest of the side. It is a detailed site, at least for liberal Democrats, who usually justify their agenda with the site. This site is basically an attempt to make it look impossible to get Trump re-elected. It also makes polls look biased toward Republicans, which is misleading, as the polls favor Democrats by six points.