Fivey Fox (FiveThirtyEight)

FiveThirtyEight, sometimes called 538, is an American blog focusing on political analysis and polling. The site, named after the number of electors in the United States Electoral College, was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregator and blog by analyst Nate Silver. In 2023, Silver left the outlet, taking the rights to his statistical models to his Silver Bulletin mailing list. Disney subsequently hired analyst G. Elliot Morris to develop new statistical models. On September 18, 2023, the original domain fivethirtyeight.com was shut down, and the page was redirected to an ABC News segment. -Guy- • Blog -Country- • USA -Foundation- • March 7, 2008[1]​ -Foundress)- • Nate Silver -Gender- • Political analysis, surveys -Topics- • Opinion poll -Language- • English -Price- • Free access —Owner— • ABC News • Walt Disney Company

ESPN to sister company ABC News (also owned by The Walt Disney Company). During the 2008 United States primaries and presidential election, the site compiled polling data using a unique methodology derived from Silver's background in baseball statistics to "weight polls with comparable demographics." Silver weighted each poll according to the "pollster's accuracy percentage, sample size, and date of the poll." Since the 2008 election, the site has published articles, typically creating or analyzing statistical information, on a wide variety of topics, with a focus on political information. This includes a monthly update on Senate turnover, federal economic policy, congressional support for passing various laws, public support for healthcare reform, climate change legislation, LGBT rights, elections in other countries around the world, and marijuana legalization, among many other topics. The site and its founder are primarily known for their statistical election forecasting models, including one for the 2012 presidential election, where FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states. FiveThirtyEight has won numerous awards. These include the Bloggie Awards for Best Political Blog in 2009, as well as the Webby Awards for Best Political Blog in 2012 and 2013. In 2016, when the site became part of ESPN, FiveThirtyEight won the Global Editors Network award for Best Data Journalism Site.

18 footnotes. Every detail of how pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here [referring to another article], in the form of Pollster Scorecards, a feature we'll continue to roll out in the coming weeks for each of the major polling companies, which will explain in some detail how we arrived at the particular rating we made for each. Regarding why the full database of 538 polls had not been made public, Silver responded, "The main reason is that I don't know if I have the legal right to do so. The poll database was compiled from approximately eight or ten separate data sources, which were disclosed in a comment I posted shortly after the pollster ratings were published, and which are detailed again at the end of this article. These include some subscription services and others from websites that are direct competitors of this one. Although the polls contained in these databases are ultimately a matter of public record and we clearly feel we have every right to use them for research purposes, I don't know what rights we might have to republish their data in full." Silver also commented on the fact that the 538 ratings had contributed to Markos Moulitsas's decision to end Daily Kos's use of Research 2000 as a pollster. On June 11, 2010, Mark Blumenthal also commented on the issue of transparency in an article in the National Journal titled "Rating Transparency: Nate Silver's impressive ranking of pollsters' accuracy is less impressive when it comes to clarifying what data is used." He noted that in the case of Research 2000, there were some discrepancies between what Silver reported and what the pollster himself reported. Other researchers

In September 2014, Silver released all of its pollster qualifications, as well as descriptive summary data for the more than 6,600 polls in its data collection, into the public domain for the final three weeks of the U.S. presidential primaries and general elections, state gubernatorial elections, and U.S. Senate and Congressional elections for the years 1998–2012. In addition to updating its pollster qualifications, it published an updated methodological report.

Nate Silver started FiveThirtyEight in early March 2008, publishing under the pseudonym Poblano, the same name he had used since November 2007 when he began publishing a diary on the political blog Daily Kos. The name FiveThirtyEight derives from the 538 electors in the United States Electoral College. Writing for Daily Kos, Silver had gained a following, particularly for his primary election forecast on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. As of that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus American Samoa, Poblano predicted that Barack Obama would emerge with 859 delegates and Hillary Clinton with 829; In the final election, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Times opinion columnist William Kristol wrote: "And an interesting regression analysis on the Daily Kos website (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance in Ohio than is generally believed." FiveThirtyEight gained even more national attention for beating most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic Party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in National Journal, "Over the past week, an anonymous blogger writing under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven largely by demographics and past vote data. Critics scoffed. Most public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina... But a funny thing happened. The model was right." Silver relied on demographic data and voting history in other states during the Democratic primary elections in

Rasmussen Reports had a seemingly short-term partnership with FiveThirtyEight to include this unique methodology for generating polling averages in its "Balance of Power Calculator." At the same time, FiveThirtyEight's daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank," a blog published by The New Republic. In July 2008, the site began reporting regular updates to its projections for the 2008 U.S. Senate elections. Special procedures were developed based on both polling and demographic analysis. Projections were updated weekly. By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight was approaching 2.5 million visitors per week, while the average was approximately 400,000 per weekday. During October 2008, the site received 3.63 million unique visitors, 20.57 million site visits, and 32.18 million page views. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.

In the final update to his presidential forecast model at noon on November 4, 2008, Silver projected a popular vote victory of 6.1 percentage points for Barack Obama and a total electoral vote of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed state-by-state projections). Obama won with 365 electoral college votes. Silver's predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in Indiana and Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, which awards a separate electoral vote from the rest of the state. His projected national popular vote differential was lower than the actual figure by 7.2 points. The Senate forecasts proved correct for each race, but the near-deadlock in Minnesota led to a recount that was not resolved until June 30, 2009. In Alaska, after a protracted recount, incumbent Republican Ted Stevens conceded the seat to Democrat Mark Begich on November 19, a result that Silver had predicted on election day. [26] In Georgia, a runoff election on December 2 led to the re-election of Republican Saxby Chambliss, a result that was also consistent with Silver's original projection.

During the 2008 election campaign, Sean Quinn, a second contributor, drew on his knowledge and experience with campaign organizations to evaluate the fieldwork and "get-out-the-vote" strategies of the McCain and Obama campaigns. Quinn, a poker player, drew an analogy between Barack Obama's campaign strategy and a poker player who has multiple outs to win a hand. In September, Quinn launched a series of essays called On the Road. Quinn traveled from state to state telling the story of the campaign from the battlefield, based on observations and interviews with grassroots campaign workers.

For the first two months after the election, there were no major innovations in the content. A substantial percentage of the articles focused on the Senate elections: the runoff elections in Georgia, won by Saxby Chambliss; the vote recounts in Alaska (won by Mark Begich) and Minnesota (Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman); and the appointments of Senate replacements in Colorado, New York, and Illinois. Following President Obama's inauguration, Sean Quinn reported that he would be moving to Washington, D.C., to continue writing about politics from there. On February 4, 2009, he became the first blogger to join the White House press corps. However, after that time, he contributed only a handful of articles to FiveThirtyEight. During the post-2008 election period, Silver devoted his attention to developing tools for analyzing the upcoming 2010 Congressional elections, as well as discussing policy issues and the political agenda for the Obama administration, especially economic policies. He developed a list of 2010 Senate races, including monthly updates on projected partisan turnover. Silver later adapted his methods to address a variety of issues of the time, including health care reform, climate change, unemployment, and popular support for same-sex marriage. He wrote a series of columns investigating the credibility of polls by the Georgia-based firm Strategic Vision, LLC. According to Silver's analysis, Strategic Vision's data showed statistical anomalies that were inconsistent with random polling. Later, he uncovered indirect evidence that Strategic Vision may have gone so far as to fabricate the results of a citizenship survey taken by Oklahoma high school students, leading him to be accused of misleading people.

FiveThirtyEight covered the November 3, 2009, United States elections in detail. FiveThirtyEight writers Schaller, Gelman, and Silver also gave extensive coverage to the January 19, 2010, Massachusetts special election for the United States Senate. The "538 model" once again aggregated the disparate polls to correctly predict that Republican Scott Brown would win. In spring 2010, FiveThirtyEight focused on the United Kingdom general election scheduled for May 6, with a series of over forty articles on the subject culminating in projections of the number of seats the three major parties were expected to win. Following a series of preliminary publications in January and February, Renard Sexton examined topics such as the UK polling industry and the "emergence" of third-party Liberal Democrats, while Silver, Sexton, and Dan Berman developed a seat projection model. The UK election was the first time the FiveThirtyEight team "live-blog" election night of a non-US election. In April 2010, The Guardian published Silver's predictions for the 2010 UK general election. Most polling organizations in the UK use the concept of a uniform swing to predict election outcomes. However, applying his own methodology, Silver produced very different results, suggesting that a Conservative victory might have been the more likely outcome. After a series of articles, including critiques of and responses to other election analysts, his "final projection" was published on the eve of the election. In the end, Silver's projections were wrong, particularly compared to those of some other organizations, and Silver wrote a post-mortem on his blog. Silver examined

—Partnership with The New York Times: 2010–2013—

On June 3, 2010, Silver announced that in early August the blog would be "relaunched under the domain NYTimes.com ". The transition took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication of Silver's first FiveThirtyEight blog article online in The New York Times. On June 3, 2010, The New York Times and Silver announced that FiveThirtyEight had formed a partnership under which the blog would be hosted by the Times for a period of three years. In legal terms, FiveThirtyEight granted the Times a "license" to publish the blog. The blog would be listed under the "Politics" tab of the Times' News section. In this way, FiveThirtyEight would be subject to and benefit from the Times' technical editing and production, while FiveThirtyEight would be responsible for creating the content. Silver received offers from several major media entities before selecting the Times. Under the terms of the agreement, Silver would also write monthly articles for the print versions of both the newspaper and the Sunday magazine. Silver didn't give his blog away to the highest bidder because he was concerned about maintaining his own voice while gaining the exposure and technical support that a larger media company could provide. "There's a bit of a Groucho Marx quality to it," Silver has said. "You shouldn't want to belong to any media brand that seems desperate to have you as a member, even though they're probably offering you the most money." The first column of the renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus appeared in the Times on August 25, 2010, with the introduction of the U.S. Senate election forecasts. At the same time, Silver published a brief history of the blog. All columns from the original FiveThirtyEight were also archived for public access. Shortly after FiveThirtyEight moved to The New

in the Chamber.

When the transition to The New York Times was announced, Silver listed his writing staff for the first time. However, of the seven writers listed, only three of them had published at 538/New York Times as of the end of December 2010: Silver, Renard Sexton, and Hale Stewart. Andrew Gelman contributed again in early 2011. Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011. Beginning in 2011, one writer who became a regular contributor was Micah Cohen. Cohen periodically published a column titled "Readings and Reactions" in which he summarized Silver's articles from the previous two weeks, as well as reactions to them in the media and other blogs, and suggested some further reading related to the subject matter of Silver's columns. Silver identified Cohen as "my news assistant." Cohen also contributed additional columns on occasion. On September 12, 2011, Silver introduced another writer: "FiveThirtyEight extends a warm welcome to John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, who will be writing a series of posts for this site over the next month. Mr. Sides is also the founder of The Monkey Cage blog, which was named Blog of the Year 2010 by The Week magazine."

While politics and elections remained FiveThirtyEight's primary focus, the blog also occasionally covered sports, including March Madness and the 2012 NCAA men's basketball tournament selection process, the BCS rankings in NCAA college football, the NBA, and Major League Baseball matters ranging from the 2011 attendance at the New York Mets' Citi Field to the historic 2011 collapse of the Boston Red Sox. The site has also published predictions for the Academy Awards. Additionally, FiveThirtyEight sometimes focused its attention on other topics, such as the economics of blogging, Standard & Poor's financial ratings, economists' tendency to underestimate unemployment levels, and the economic impact and media coverage of Hurricane Irene (2011). FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves for news stories covering the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests. Silver noted that conflicts with the police caused the steepest increases in protest coverage and assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports on the size and location of events across the United States.

FiveThirtyEight presented its 2012 general election prediction model on June 7, 2012. The model predicted both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, the latter being the central element of the exercise and involving a prediction for each state. In the initial prediction, Barack Obama was estimated to have a 61.8% chance of winning the electoral vote. The website provided maps and statistics on the election results in each state, as well as at the national level. Subsequent posts addressed methodological issues such as the "house effects" of different pollsters, as well as the validity of telephone surveys that did not call cell phones. On the morning of November 6, Election Day, Silver's model gave President Obama a 90.9% probability of winning a majority of the electoral votes. The 538 model correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Silver, along with at least two academic analysts who aggregated surveys from multiple pollsters, correctly predicted not only all 50 states but also all nine "swing states." In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "failed in six of its nine surveys of swing states." An independent analysis of Silver’s state-by-state projections, assessing whether the percentages of votes the candidates actually received were within the “margin of error” of Silver’s forecasts, found that “48 of the 50 states were actually within his margin of error, giving him a success rate of 96%. And assuming that his projected margin of error figures represent 95 percent confidence intervals, which they likely did, Silver performed exactly as well as he expected after more than 50 trials. A magician, indeed.” Other researchers published additional evidence.

—Continue ⬇️

In July 2013, it was revealed that Silver and his FiveThirtyEight blog would be leaving The New York Times and joining ESPN. In its announcement of the acquisition of FiveThirtyEight, ESPN reported that "Silver will serve as the site's editor-in-chief and will build a team of reporters, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months. Like Grantland, which ESPN launched in 2011, the site will retain an independent brand sensibility and editorial point of view, while interacting with other websites in the ESPN and Disney families. The site will return to its original URL, www.FiveThirtyEight.com." According to Silver, FiveThirtyEight's focus in its ESPN phase would broaden: "People also think it's going to be a sports site with a little bit of politics, or a politics site with sports. But we take our science, economics, and lifestyle coverage very seriously. It's a data journalism site. Politics is a topic that data journalism sometimes covers well. It's certainly good with presidential elections. But we don't really see politics as the way the site is going to grow." FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN affiliate website on March 17, 2014. Silver's lead story explained that "FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. We've expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of those will focus exclusively on politics; instead, our coverage will span five main subject areas: politics, economics, science, life, and sports. Our team also has a broad skill set and expertise in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming, and data-literate reporting. So, in addition to written stories, we'll have interactive graphics and features."

2.8 million unique visitors in April 2014 to 10.7 million unique visitors in January 2016.

On September 3, 2014, FiveThirtyEight presented its forecasts for each of the 36 U.S. Senate elections being contested that year. At the time, the Republican Party was given a 64 percent chance of retaining the majority of Senate seats after the election. However, Silver also noted, "An equally important issue is the high degree of uncertainty surrounding that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate." About two weeks later, the forecast showed that the Republican chances of maintaining the majority had dropped to 55 percent.

FiveThirtyEight attempted to apply its mathematical models to the Oscars and produced internal predictions on the subject, correctly predicting four out of six categories. The website also compiled a list of other predictions made by others using different methods.

—Presidential primary elections edit-

FiveThirtyEight applied two separate models to forecast the 2016 presidential primary election: a poll-only model and a survey-based model. The poll-only model relied solely on polls from a particular state, while the survey-based model relied on state polls, national polls, and endorsements. For each race, FiveThirtyEight produced probability distributions and average expected vote percentages according to both models. In June 2015, FiveThirtyEight argued that Donald Trump "is not a real candidate." When Donald Trump became the Republican nominee in May 2016, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote that "predictions can have consequences" and criticized FiveThirtyEight for underestimating Trump's chances. He argued that by giving "Trump a 2 percent chance of securing the nomination despite strong polls in his favor... they also arguably undermined the journalistic will to analyze his record as aggressively as those of his most serious putative rivals." In a lengthy retrospective, "How I Acted Like an Expert and Got It Wrong About Donald Trump," published in May 2016 after Trump became the likely nominee, Silver reviewed how he had been wrong in assessing Trump's chances at the start of the primary campaign. Silver wrote: "The big mistake is curious for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight, including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned, our early estimates of Trump's chances weren't based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we call 'subjective probabilities' — educated guesses.

in every other state after Iowa and New Hampshire" and that "the Democratic establishment would rush to crush him" if he doesn't. Sanders won 23 states in the primaries. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive nonprofit media watchdog group, wrote in May 2016 that FiveThirtyEight "sacrificed their integrity to go after Sanders" and that they "have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry and into the realm of hacking—that is, not just treating their own opinions as if they were objective data, but manipulating the data to fit their views." FiveThirtyEight's predictions for each state primary for both the Republican and Democratic party nominations were based on statistical analysis, not the opinions of analysts. The basic data employed was polling, which FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state (while also considering national polls) using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008. In the primaries Since 2016, the projections also took endorsements into account. The website also tracked the delegate accumulation from the party's national convention. In a comparison of prediction success published by Bloomberg News after the primary season was complete, FiveThirtyEight's prediction success tied for the highest percentage of correct primary poll winners, at 92%; but it lagged behind PredictWise in predicting a larger set of primaries. Notably, even with FiveThirtyEight's track record of correctly predicting elections where pollsters get things wrong, it still missed the mark on Bernie Sanders's stunning Michigan primary victory, for example, considered "one of the biggest upsets in modern political history."

The Electoral College polls in the final weeks were based not only on Clinton's small lead in the general polls but also on Trump's improvement in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania, combined with Clinton's poor performance in several of those key states compared to Obama's performance in 2012. The main problems pointed out by the forecasting model were the imbalance of Clinton's improvement in highly populated states like Texas, Georgia (projected safe for Republicans), and California (projected safe for Democrats); this, combined with her inability to attract white voters without a college degree, a population increase in key states, and a possible decline in minority turnout, consequently, Clinton's chances of winning the Electoral College were not improving. Silver also focused on state-by-state numbers in so-called "must-win" states like Ohio and Florida, in addition to an account of the polls' margin of error in leads of less than three points. Donald Trump won the election. FiveThirtyEight projected a much higher probability of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other pollsters, a projection criticized by Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post for "skewing" the trend too far in Trump's favor. While FiveThirtyEight stated that "nonetheless, Clinton is probably going to win, and could win by a wide margin," the forecaster also noted the uncertainty of poll trackers in some cases, the significant number of undecided voters, and the unpredictable outcome in traditionally swing states. In April 2018, it was announced that FiveThirtyEight would be transferred to ABC News from ESPN, Inc., majority owned by The Walt Disney Company. The ABC News live streaming channel launched on Roku in May 2019. With the reorganization that created the Walt Disney Direct-to-TV segment,

—2020 US Election— —Forecast redesign edit-

In early August 2020, FiveThirtyEight announced that for their 2020 general election forecast they had designed a new chart structure. This included a modular structure, a "ball swarm" layout for the chart representing each candidate's chances, and the addition of a "forecaster mascot" named Fivey Fox. An episode of "Chart Chat" discussing the design described the direction by saying that "FiveThirtyEight has leaned heavily into a sympathetic and engaging approach. The Fivey Fox mascot appears next to most charts with calls for more information." Fivey Fox would also issue reminders to readers about "the potential for extreme outcomes," according to Jessica Hullman, in an article written for The Hill. Hullman also said of the design that the introduction of the mascot, along with the new, streamlined look of the page, was "perhaps the strongest indicator yet that Silver intends to emphasize uncertainty" in his 2020 election coverage. Jasmine Mithani, a visual journalist for FiveThirtyEight, said in an interview when asked about complaints about the new mascot, "I think the biggest complaint about Fivey Fox is that some people find him infantilizing, but that wasn't our intention" and that the motivation for including the character was to help make the forecast more "a teaching tool." In November 2020, Rolling Stone reported that Fivey Fox had reached over 7,000 followers on his dedicated Twitter account. The forecast favored the actual winner in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and four of the five congressional districts that award electoral votes, and omitted only Florida, North Carolina, and Maine's 2nd congressional district. In those three races, the forecast had favored Biden, but Trump won. Despite

House elections, his forecast favored Democrats to gain seats, but the Democrats suffered a net loss of 10 seats. The actual House results fell outside his 80% confidence interval, with Democrats gaining 222 seats, less than the lower limit of the confidence interval of 225.

In January 2023, The Daily Beast reported that the website was on the "chopping block" amid cost-cutting measures by ABC News, and a sale of the website was being considered. It also noted that several key employees, including editor-in-chief Micah Cohen, politics editor Sarah E. Frostenson, and sports editor Sara Ziegler, had left the website and their positions had not been filled. An ABC spokesperson responded to the report, stating that "there are no imminent decisions regarding [its] relationship with FiveThirtyEight." Nonetheless, in April, Silver announced that she was leaving the site amid widespread layoffs at ABC News, who said the website would be "streamlined" ahead of the 2024 election cycle; editor Chadwick Matlin was among the many laid off. According to Silver, two-thirds of FiveThirtyEight's staff were laid off in one day. Since the layoffs, FiveThirtyEight's sports and science coverage has ground to a halt, and the website has largely returned to its roots of exclusive political coverage. In May 2023, ABC News hired G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist at The Economist who has often been described as a rival to Silver, to lead the site as editorial director of data analysis. At 538, Morris developed a new election forecasting model for the 2024 election. In the run-up to Biden's withdrawal, 538 was the only professional election forecaster to give Biden majority odds of winning the 2024 election. Silver criticized Morris's model, describing it as at best ignoring polls and giving Biden positive odds simply because of his incumbency, and at worst as "flawed." The election forecast remained suspended for a month after Biden dropped out, before being replaced by a new model for Kamala Harris versus Trump that put more emphasis on the

—Recognitions and awards— In September 2008, FiveThirtyEight became the first blog selected as a Featured Narrative by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. According to the Foundation, "In his posts, former economic analyst and baseball statistics prodigy Nate Silver explains the presidential race, using the dramatic tension inherent in the run-up to Election Day to drive his narrative. On November 5, we'll have a winner and a loser, but in the meantime, Silver weaves his tale from the countless polls that confound us mere mortals." In November 2008, the New York Times described FiveThirtyEight as "one of the year's rising online stars." Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins named FiveThirtyEight #1 in "Ten Things That Managed Not to Be Bad in 2008, Media Edition." FiveThirtyEight is the winner of the 2008 Weblog Award for "Best Political Coverage." FiveThirtyEight won the 2009 Bloggie Award for "Best Political Blog" at the 9th Annual Weblog Awards. In April 2009, Silver was named "Blogger of the Year" at The Week's 6th Annual Opinion Awards, for his work at FiveThirtyEight. In September 2009, FiveThirtyEight's predictive model was featured as a cover story in STATS: The Magazine for Students of Statistics. In November 2009, FiveThirtyEight was named one of "Our Favorite Blogs of 2009" ("Fifty Blogs We Can't Get Enough Of") by PC Magazine. In December 2009, FiveThirtyEight was recognized by The New York Times Magazine in its "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas" for conducting a "Poll Forensics" investigation into possible falsification of survey data by a major polling firm. In November 2010, Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris,

"Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences at the 16th Annual Webby Awards. April 2013: FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award for "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences at the 17th Annual Webby Awards. June 2016: FiveThirtyEight was named "Data Journalism Website of the Year" in 2016 by the Global Editors Network, a Paris-based organization that promotes innovation in newsrooms worldwide. FiveThirtyEight won an additional award as "News Data App of the Year (Large Newsrooms)" for "Swing the Election," an interactive project by Aaron Bycoffe and David Wasserman. September 2017: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine awarded the 2017 Communication Prize in the "Online" category to "Maggie Koerth-Baker, Ben Casselman, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, and Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight for 'Gun Deaths in America.' 'A balanced, fact-filled analysis of an unfolding crisis, with compelling interactions that meticulously pay attention to the quality of data and statistics.' (italics in original) June 2018: "The Redistricting Atlas" was named "News App of the Year" by the Data Journalism Awards sponsored by the Global Publishers Network.

Fivey Fox is the mascot of FiveThirtyEight. This is in reference to a phrase attributed to Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." The name "Fivey" is a reference to the name of the website, FiveThirtyEight. Fivey Fox is orange, white, and beige with comically sized black glasses and has white sock-like paws.

A short, orange-furred anthropomorphic fox who wears thick, square, black glasses and a thin, white snout. The fox's ears are slightly pastel yellow, along with the tip of his tail and belly fur. He has two fringes that point upwards on his forehead, and as a bonus, his fur comes in three colors: white, orange, and pastel yellow. And with the part of the legs up to the ankles (or even to the knees) are white fur as well as the hands up to the wrists are white fur, a somewhat long black nose and black eyes (with white sclera) and thin.

A studious fox, expert in political analysis and polling, with a high-to-average intellectual capacity, modest and charismatic. Curious, he takes his work seriously and is often seen cheerful.

Male

Masculine, "The" + "Man"