An archived website of FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism publication known for its polling analysis and election models, now redirects readers to ABC News, its owner and former host. As a result, several thousand articles dating back to FiveThirtyEight’s founding in 2008 are no longer accessible online, according to Nathaniel Rakich, the publication’s former editor-in-chief.
ABC shuttered FiveThirtyEight, founded by election analyst and forecaster Nate Silver and specializing in data-driven analytics on elections, sports and other topics, in March 2025. But an earlier standalone version of the publication, fivethirtyeight.com — discontinued in 2023, when FiveThirtyEight merged with ABCNews.com — had been archived and remained accessible online.
It’s unclear why or when the content was removed, although comments about the lack of access began appearing online Friday morning. ABC News declined multiple requests for comment.
A large majority of fivethirtyeight.com is no longer available; users trying to access the site are now redirected to ABC News’ political news page. The only part of the old site that appeared to still be accessible Saturday was data.fivethirtyeight.com, believed to provide access to the data and code underlying the publication’s work. However, many relevant links redirected users to ABC News.
Mr. Rakich, who oversaw the editorial operations of FiveThirtyEight, is now editor-in-chief of Votebeat, a nonprofit organization that covers voting access and election integrity. He was one of the first to flag the issue on social media, posting an article Friday morning about the “unnecessary erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.” About 700 of his own articles were among the lost works, he said Friday.
Mr. Silver, who left FiveThirtyEight in 2023, taking his hugely influential polling model with him, said he first noticed something was amiss on Thursday night, when he was trying to connect the dots to FiveThirtyEight’s previous coverage.
The link he was trying to insert seemed “totally broken,” Mr. Silver, who now edits the Silver Bulletin, a newsletter on political polls, sports and other topics, said in a telephone interview.
The next day, Mr. Silver responded to Mr. Rakich’s message with one of his own, in which he attacked ABC News. Mr. Silver said he recently tried to buy FiveThirtyEight’s intellectual property rights, but ABC rebuffed him.
Like Mr. Rakich and other former FiveThirtyEight employees, Mr. Silver was not entirely surprised that fivethirtyeight.com had apparently gone offline, given that the publication had closed its doors last year. But he was really sorry, he said, to see it go.
“All the work that was done, you know, groundbreaking work covering this remarkable period in American politics, is lost,” he said, adding, “It’s really depressing.”
Mr. Rakich said in a text message Friday that Mr. Silver had likely lost access to about 3,500 articles he had written.
Mr. Silver founded FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, as a poll aggregation and analysis blog in 2008. The site became much more popular after successfully predicting Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election that year. In June 2010, FiveThirtyEight became part of The New York Times under a three-year licensing agreement. (The Times maintains a FiveThirtyEight archive, although it is not visibly accessible through PK Press Club.)
In 2013, ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight and ABC News purchased it in 2018. Both ESPN and ABC are now owned by the Walt Disney Company.
G. Elliott Morris, who took over as head of FiveThirtyEight after Mr. Silver left and now writes a Substack newsletter, Strength in Numbers, said in an interview that he and some of his colleagues spent a lot of “internal political capital” to convince ABC to archive fivethirtyeight.com.
Mr Morris called it a “foolish business decision” for ABC to remove FiveThirtyEight’s cache of original content at a time when digital media is in serious decline. Its disappearance, he said, was “heartbreaking” for the journalists who worked there.
One of them, podcast host Galen Druke, said he lost access — due to the combination of fivethirtyeight.com’s recent demise and the publication’s official shutdown last year — to several interactive projects he had contributed to over the years and was incredibly proud of, including deep dives into gerrymandering, gun violence and women in politics. Some of this work inspired a university course and was integrated into a program.
FiveThirtyEight, Mr. Druke said in an interview, built a legacy of powerful data visualization and interactive stories that changed news media.
But today, he says, the erasure of archives has left “a lot of hard-working journalists with no connection to their portfolio.”
