FiveThirtyEight, the politics site and podcast known for deep dives on statistical predictions, was shuttered last year after a series of layoffs and strategy shifts by its corporate owner.
Now, the people behind its popular flagship podcast — Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Galen Druke — are betting they can resurrect its spirit with a new show called “Still Counting.”
The three hosts want the podcast to be just as nonpartisan and empirical as its forebear, as they cover the 2026 midterm elections and new topics like the role of artificial intelligence and prediction markets in politics.
But they’re starting over under the umbrella of an unabashedly progressive media company started by three Obama administration veterans, Crooked Media. FiveThirtyEight was previously licensed or owned by major traditional media brands including The New York Times, ESPN and ABC News.
They say they are confident the show will work even under the new owners.
“There is a market for people who think politics is important, are intellectually interested in it and think it’s high stakes, but don’t want things filtered through a partisan lens,” Mr. Silver said. “That’s one of our markets.”
And they are hoping that their audience, built up over years, will follow them to the new venture, in the latest test of whether the star power in journalism now lies more with individual personalities or with the institutions they worked for.
Lucinda Treat, the chief executive of Crooked Media, said the company had been looking to expand into coverage of artificial intelligence and prediction markets before connecting with “Still Counting.” She said that despite the company’s progressive bona fides — its flagship show is “Pod Save America” — she wanted to ensure the new hosts felt comfortable to do a nonpartisan show.
“We are very focused on fact-based critical information and actionable knowledge,” she said.
Mr. Silver started FiveThirtyEight as a blog in 2008. It skyrocketed in popularity in the lead-up to that year’s presidential election, when Mr. Silver correctly predicted the presidential election winner in 49 states.
After a series of ownership transfers, FiveThirtyEight landed at ABC News, which is owned by Disney. By early 2025, Disney shut down the site and laid off the remaining staff members as part of broader cuts. In May, ABC News removed the archived version of the website from the internet.
Mr. Silver, who left FiveThirtyEight in 2023, said his recent success with his Substack, Silver Bulletin, which has more than 320,000 subscribers, had shown him that FiveThirtyEight could have succeeded in the new media environment if Disney had worked out how to monetize it.
A Disney representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Silver, Ms. Malone and Mr. Druke, who met working at FiveThirtyEight, together hosted the “FiveThirtyEight Politics” podcast from 2016 through 2020.
Last year, they began experimenting with live shows, hosting half a dozen at New York’s Comedy Cellar venue. The events sold out, a sign to them that there was still an audience for their kind of data-focused analysis with a side of banter, especially heading into a midterm election and the 2028 presidential primaries.
“There is an election nerd community out there that has been following a lot of our work even since we’ve let FiveThirtyEight that’s been rooting for a reunion,” Mr. Druke said.
“Still Counting” will come out weekly, with an introductory episode on Wednesday and the first full episode releasing next Wednesday. The show will focus on data analysis and polling while also delving into the new worlds of A.I. and betting markets, “the big existential questions of politics,” Ms. Malone said.
Mr. Druke acknowledged that there was much more skepticism around data and polling now than a decade ago. “Being a savvy observer of politics and data means not resigning oneself to this idea that all polling is wrong,” he said. “It’s being smart enough to know the caveats to append.”
All three hosts will continue their day jobs. Mr. Silver writes his Substack newsletter about politics, sports and artificial intelligence. Ms. Malone, a media and politics writer for The New Yorker, is on leave to write a book about the Make America Healthy Again movement. Mr. Druke hosts “GD Politics,” a podcast and newsletter.
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