The reporting website FiveThirtyEight, which focused on news of opinion polls, polling analysis, politics, economics, and sports, lasted just two years under its new owner, Disney-ABC. The website is now just an ABC political news aggregator, nothing more.
Founder Nate Silver started the company in 2008 and sold the company to Disney in 2023, although he took the rights to his forecasting model with him to his new website, Silver Bulletin, at the Substack newsletter group where Must Read Alaska also publishes a newsletter.
Silver essentially took others’ work and published predictions and averages based off the this party polling work, making a few correct predictions that won him accolades in the media. He didn’t do his own polling. But he lost his leftist base when he wrongly predicted that Donald Trump would lose the presidential race in 2016, and the Left never forgave him.
FiveThirtyEight also rated pollsters, by calculating and analyzing the historical accuracy and methodology of each firm.
Under Disney, G. Elliott Morris, formerly with The Economist, was hired to continue the FiveThirtyEight site; he developed a new prediction model for the website under the name 538.
Morris’s 538 had a rough history. It was the only professional election forecaster that gave President Joe Biden the majority odds of winning the election last July; that was just before Biden withdrew.
This week the FiveThirtyEight website was shut down altogether.
Although FiveThirtyEight.com can still be reached, it takes users to an ABC page devoted to politics, fed by artificial intelligence content generation. The actual human-driven content that made FiveThirtyEight such a powerful and interesting website is not accessible, including all the polling it reported on about Alaska.
On Friday, Monmouth University also announced it is shutting down its polling division, the Monmouth Polling Institute. Over the course of 98 polls, not even a third of them came within the standard margin of error, and the bias was D+4.34. Still, FiveThirtyEight gave Monmouth an A+ rating.
Patrick Murray built the polling institute from scratch in 2005, just before Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight.
Alaska-based Dittman Research is still going strong 55 years after being started. In fact, the only polling firm that is older is Gallup. George Gallup invented/discovered modern polling methods in 1935, while Dave Dittman founded Dittman Research 34 years later in 1969.
There were likely some other firms prior to Dave Dittman, but they are long gone now. Dittman is now under the ownership of Matt Larkin, who kept the Dittman name, and has his best year ever in 2024.
“Dave built a great foundation and our Alaska clients have stuck with us. We are very grateful!” said Larkin.
> and the Left never forgave him.
The left rarely forgives. They love the sin, but hate the sinner.
I like Rich Barris (People’s Pundit), Mark Mitchell (Rasmussen) and Atlas because they are accurate and have been for several cycles.
538 became a pale shadow of their former self as soon as Nate Silver left. About time it shut down, as it provided nothing of value anymore.