FiveThirtyEight is beneficial, and it’s fairly simple as to why. 1. People want to know who is winning. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. People

FiveThirtyEight is beneficial, and it’s fairly simple as to why. 1. People want to know who is winning. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. People want to know, and thus there will always be a market for it. 2. Polling is imperfect and it’s a lot of work to understand how to interpret the various polls out or to forecast in lieu of polls. Political journalism before FiveThirtyEight was filled with even more crooks and charlatans coming up with nonsensical ways to forecast elections or interpret polls. There was a lot more noise in the system. FiveThirtyEight shut that stuff down to an incredible degree. 3. FiveThirtyEight has introduced more folks to probability theory than I think any other journalistic collective. What has always made them different is that they provide probabilities, not certainties.