Election Information

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): With unified control of the White House and Congress, Democrats are pushing a number of sweeping legislative priorities, from an expansive voting-reform bill to weakening the filibuster to now possibly adding (or at least studying the possibility of…

Daunte Wright was driving in his car through Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, two days ago when police officers pulled him over and later fatally shot him. This isn’t the first time cops have used excessive or fatal force against a Black person. In fact, just 10 miles away from where Wright died, former Minneapolis police officer…

Georgia’s new election restrictions have garnered no shortage of criticism thanks to provisions that directly impose additional burdens on voters, such as an ID requirement for absentee voting or a ban on distributing food or water to people waiting in line to vote. But equally importantly, the law opens up the possibility for elections to…

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Georgia’s new voting law has captured headlines for all the ways in which it makes voting harder. It’s also not the only state considering these kinds of laws; there are nearly 20 states in which voting restrictions have…

Talking about reparations was once politically taboo. The idea was not only widely unpopular, but the term was understood differently depending on who was asked. Even the most progressive stalwarts on race issues — those who said they were in favor of reparations for Black people as restitution for slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination — didn’t…

One of the many weird things about reporting on QAnon is that you inevitably start thinking like a conspiracy theorist yourself. Covering a cult as bizarre and perverse as QAnon — its followers believe there is a global cabal of Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers that an anonymous government insider known as “Q” is working to…

The wheels of democracy never stop turning — even in odd years. Between the presidential race of 2020 and the midterm elections of 2022, hundreds of elections will be held in 2021 in states and cities whose election calendars don’t sync up with most of the rest of the country. There will also be at…

Even before the coronavirus became a worldwide pandemic, some astute observers of racial and ethnic politics feared that the emerging outbreak in China would lead to (and were already contributing to) a rise in anti-Asian sentiment in America. After all, the United States has a long and ugly history of scapegoating racial and ethnic groups…

That whoosh you just heard? That was House Democrats breathing a sigh of relief now that Democrat Rita Hart has withdrawn her challenge to contest the result in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, which she lost to Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks by just six votes last November — one of the closest federal elections in U.S. history.…

FiveThirtyEight’s quantitative editor Laura Bronner speaks with Galen Druke about FiveThirtyEight and The Marshall Project’s investigation into the amount of money America’s cities have spent on police misconduct settlements — in the range of $3 billion over the last decade. What’s less clear is whether the situation has improved within that time period.