FiveThirtyEight redirects to ABC News after shutdown and layoffs

FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance is more than a brand being folded into a corporate website. It marked the loss of a widely used public record for election coverage, one that journalists, researchers and readers had come to treat as a living archive of polls, averages and presidential approval data.

The site moved to ABC News on September 18, 2023, when ABC said new FiveThirtyEight articles would appear on its news vertical, older links would keep working, and fivethirtyeight.com would redirect to ABC’s home for the brand. ABC also said its interactives, including election forecasts and polling averages, would continue to be updated. That promise ended in March 2025, when Disney and ABC News shut down FiveThirtyEight amid roughly 200 layoffs across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, a reduction of about 6 percent of the division’s workforce. About 15 FiveThirtyEight employees were laid off, and ABC also consolidated magazine teams while merging digital and social operations.

The shutdown erased more than articles. FiveThirtyEight’s polling databases, including its presidential approval tracker, went offline, cutting off a data source that had been embedded in political coverage for years. Major outlets had relied on that material, including The New York Times and Silver Bulletin, and its absence forced a broader question about who controls the fate of legacy journalism once a newsroom closes and the servers go dark.

That question has a practical answer in the case of FiveThirtyEight: whoever owns the archive, the infrastructure and the brand. The site’s roots go back to Nate Silver’s 2007 posts on Daily Kos and its standalone launch in March 2008, but its later life was shaped by corporate stewardship, first at ESPN and then at ABC News. When ABC shut the site down, users were left not only without a newsroom but without a maintained repository of trend lines, approval numbers and election data that had become part of the civic record.

The New York Times later moved to build its own public-opinion tracking effort, starting with President Trump’s job approval polling, and said the data would be free to use with attribution. Nate Silver said FiveThirtyEight had helped make polling and political-data coverage smarter, and he noted that its public databases had been a major source for election reporting. After the shutdown, users also archived FiveThirtyEight’s GitHub repositories to preserve what they could. That preservation work underscores the larger stakes: when a newsroom disappears, the loss reaches beyond one label on a homepage and into the record of how elections, public opinion and democratic power were documented.