The Religious Regions of the U.S.

The Southwest and Southeast regions of the United States lived up to their reputation as the home of the nation’s Bible Belt in 2017, producing nine of the nation’s 11 most religious states. In contrast, the Pacific and New England regions have 10 of the 11 least religious states for […] Read more »

FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast: Let’s Play Family Feud!

What are President Trump’s strengths and weaknesses? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team plays “FiveThirtyEight Family Feud” — a new game we made up — to try to find an answer. The team also debates the merits of the census’s new citizenship question and discusses its potential effects on political representation […] Read more »

Be Skeptical Of Anyone Who Tells You They Know How Democrats Can Win In November

… Which is a better representation of the true base partisanship of the United States, 2012 or 2016? By winning white, working-class areas (especially in the Midwest) but losing traditional GOP strongholds in suburbia and the Sun Belt, President Trump charted an electoral map that looked slightly but notably different […] Read more »

Census change will have a political impact. Question is: How much?

This week, the U.S. Census suddenly became a hot political topic in Washington – yes, you read that right, the U.S. Census. And now a partisan fight is brewing over the bureau’s crucial 2020 survey. It began on Tuesday when the Trump administration proposed a last-minute additional question to the […] Read more »

The 2016 Exit Polls Led Us to Misinterpret the 2016 Election

Crucial disputes over Democratic strategy concerning economic distribution, race and immigration have in large part been based on Election Day exit polls that now appear to have been inaccurate in key ways. According to subsequent studies, those polls substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters — many of […] Read more »