Dem
47
GOP
53
Nate Silver created the FiveThirtyEight blog in 2008 to analyze politics using mathematical models to predict elections. He became quite well known and in 2010 moved over to The New York Times on a 3-year contract. When that ran out in 2013, Silver and his team moved to The Walt Disney company's ESPN division. In 2018, Disney moved the site to its ABC News division. It was shut down in March 2025 (for unexplained reasons), but all the archived posts remained online.
At least, they remained online for a while. All of a sudden, on Friday, all the archives are gone. When ABC News was asked why they were removed, it refused to answer.
Silver didn't take the deletion well. He blasted the ABC bosses as a "bunch of a-holes." His 538 colleague Nathaniel Rakich said: "ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge." Silver tried to buy FiveThirtyEight back from ABC but the company refused.
It is hard to imagine the disk space for storing the posting was an issue. We don't know how much space they took up, but our entire content for the election year 2024, including postings, graphs, data, everything, was 800 MB. A modern 4-TB disk costs about $150, so 4 GBs of storage is 15¢ and 800 MB is 3¢. We suspect the archives were not killed because ABC couldn't afford the storage and we doubt FiveThirtyEight's content was more than pennies/year in storage costs. While there still was traffic to the site by reporters looking for historical data, we very much doubt the load on ABC's server was the problem.
It was very likely political. In April 2023, ABC fired Silver and later replaced him with G. Elliott Morris, another political statistician. Morris said that he and teammates fought with ABC to get it to keep the archives, but he lost that fight. It cost ABC virtually nothing to maintain a valuable historical record and the people involved argued strongly for keeping it (i.e., it wasn't removed due to some clerical error). We don't know what really happened.
So time for some wild, unfounded conspiracy theories. Well, conspiracy questions. Who might want to erase some detailed election history? We have no idea. And why would ABC, that bastion of support for the First Amendment, give in to pressure to do the erasing? They're not trying to merge with anyone right now. So it is a real mystery.
Now us. Every front page we have ever posted since May 24, 2004, is still online. If you go to our index page, which you can find near the bottom of the Data galore page listed on the menu to the left of the map, you will find links to the site roughly every quarter we published. We were often dark between elections in the past, which is why there are gaps. To find a specific page, click on the closest date on the index page then edit the URL in the address bar. For example, today's URL is:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Senate/Maps/May18.html
To go to, say, June 2, 2018, edit that to
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2018/Senate/Maps/Jun02.html
The file name is always three letters for the month, two digits for the date, and then .html . For presidential cycles, replace "Senate" with "Pres". In the distant past, there were not postings every day and the URL format was different. For example, Senate pages before 2013 had "dates" like "May18-s" to distinguish Senate pages from presidential pages. Remember, like so many software projects, this one was hacked together in a few days on a lark. (V) didn't expect it to last until August 2004, let alone until 2026. He also didn't expect to be getting 600,000 visitors a day in Nov. 2004, more traffic than CNN. The COBOL programmers in 1965 thought that there was no ambiguity in listing some employee's birthdate as 04-06-20 in a corporate record since they didn't expect the program to last until 2020. A lot of software just grows like Topsy.
Another way to navigate the site is to use the three links "2022 2018 2014" at the bottom of the legend box to the right of the map. If there was a page then, the link will go to it. In many cases for 2014, there is no page, but if you try the day after or the day after that, there could be a page.
Unlike Nate Silver, we have never sold out. A while back, HuffPost tried to convince us to move over to its site. We felt that we couldn't guarantee our editorial independence if we were a small cog in a big machine, so we politely declined. (V)