Disney axed Nate Silver’s once-influential FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday as part of sweeping job cuts at ABC News, ending the data-driven political site’s seven-year run at the network.
FiveThirtyEight gained national prominence for its statistical approach to political forecasting but drew criticism for inaccuracies in key elections, most notably giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning the 2016 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight’s editorial director of data analytics, G. Elliott Morris, confirmed the layoffs on Bluesky on Wednesday, writing, “As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning. This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues.”
The cuts are part of a broader restructuring at Disney, the parent company of ABC, which is slashing approximately 200 positions (about 6% of its workforce) across ABC News and Disney Entertainment Networks, continuing the trend of media company layoffs and restructuring across the industry, Mediaite reported. Many journalists lamented FiveThirtyEight’s demise on social media.
Silver, who founded the site in 2008 and left ABC in May 2023, wrote on X, “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
Silver left ABC amid reports of tension with network executives over resource allocation and editorial direction.
Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 5, 2025
FiveThirtyEight began as an independent polling aggregation platform before being licensed to The New York Times, then acquired by ESPN in 2013, and later transferred to ABC News.
Despite shuttering the project, ABC News said it would “continue to provide the best-in-class polling and political data analysis that it has offered for decades.”
The decision to close FiveThirtyEight comes as legacy media organizations face declining audiences and increasing competition from independent content creators and alternative news sources.
The shutdown also impacts several ABC News programs, with investigative shows “20/20” and “Nightline” merging into a single unit, while all three hours of “Good Morning America” will now fall under one production team instead of separate management, Variety reported.
The move reflects Disney’s ongoing financial challenges under CEO Bob Iger, who returned to the company in 2022 and has implemented multiple cost-cutting measures. Disney shares have fallen more than 3% over the past year as the entertainment giant navigates streaming losses and declining cable television viewership, according to financial data from Yahoo Finance.
