Progressives’ Strategic Choices on Health Care Likely Made Little Difference
There’s been a lot of second-guessing from the left concerning the ostensible failure of progressives to successfully negotiate a public option or other key concessions on health care reform. The...
View ArticleUK Forecasting Retrospective
Our UK forecasting model, which tried to improve upon the deficiencies inherent in uniform swing, performed underwhelmingly. We went out on something of a limb here, and sometimes when you do that, the...
View ArticleThe Problems With Forecasting and How to Get Better at It
Are political scientists any good at making predictions? Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, argued in an Op-Ed last Sunday that political scientists make...
View ArticleSome MLB Teams Will Rise, Some Will Fall (But You Shouldn’t Predict Either)
After we broke down the voting data on ESPN’s MLB Forecast results last week, an alert FiveThirtyEight reader, Andrew Jondahl, pointed out something weird in the panel’s predictions. Andrew noticed...
View ArticleHow to Predict MLB Records From Early Results
We often hear announcers and commentators say a baseball team is “on pace” to win and lose a certain number of games, by simply applying a team’s current winning percentage over 162 games. Those...
View ArticleRepublicans Have More Reason Than Ever To Worry About Primary Challenges
One of the most universal lessons of sports prediction is that margins matter. An NFL team that wins a number of games by less than a touchdown might get banner headlines for its clutch performance....
View ArticleI Went To A Psychic And Then Found Out How Right She Really Was
Here at FiveThirtyEight, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to predict stuff. The science of prediction is pretty hard to get right consistently. But in keeping with the philosophy of exploring...
View ArticleIt’s In The Cards: I Should Be Drinking, Boating And Feeling Anxious
In an article Thursday, I applied the tools of statistical analysis to my future — as told by a Manhattan tarot card reader who goes by the name Angela Lucy. Here was my basic question: Do fortune...
View ArticleThe Scotland Independence Polls Were Pretty Bad
About a year ago, I was on a book tour in Edinburgh and was asked by a couple of reporters about Scotland’s upcoming vote on whether to secede from the United Kingdom. The “yes” vote (a vote to secede)...
View ArticleWe Still Can’t Predict Earthquakes
Twenty-five years ago, millions of baseball fans around the country turned on their televisions expecting to watch a World Series game — and saw live footage of a deadly earthquake instead. The San...
View ArticleChecking The Accuracy Of My Tarot Card Reading
It’s the end of the year, and my colleague Harry Enten is working on a “what I got wrong in 2014” post. This is an admirable exercise, and I’d love to participate. But I made only a few predictions...
View ArticleWhat I Got Wrong In 2014
Thanksgiving is a time to look back on the year and remember what we are thankful for. New Year’s, on the other hand, is a time to look back and realize what we screwed up (so we can better ourselves —...
View ArticleEnough With All The ‘Back To The Future Part II’ Appraisals
“Wait a minute, Doc. What are you talking about? What happens to us in the future? What do we become, assholes or something?” — Marty McFly It’s 2015, the year during which the boring part of “Back to...
View Article2015 March Madness Predictions
FiveThirtyEight’s men’s and women’s NCAA tournament forecasting models calculate the chance of each team reaching each round, taking into account a composite of power rankings, pre-season rankings, the...
View ArticleUh, ‘Robots’ Aren’t Better Than Humans At Predicting Supreme Court Decisions
On Thursday, Vox’s Sarah Kliff wrote about human and machine Supreme Court prediction. She tweeted her findings succinctly: Robots are better at predicting Supreme Court decisions than humans....
View ArticleCan An Astrophysicist Change The Way We Watch Sports?
Truth No. 1: Most of us watch sports to see the unexpected. Truth No. 2: Plenty of us want to predict the future. Somewhere, where those two contradictory truths meet, there has been a movement afoot....
View ArticleWe Have (Almost) No Idea What The Economy Will Look Like On Election Day
There’s almost exactly one year to go until Election Day 2016. But I want to wind the clock back eight years, to Nov. 5, 2007. What were the headlines that day? According to the news aggregator...
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