It happened quietly, then all at once. If you’ve spent the last decade hitting "refresh" on a certain data-heavy corner of the internet every election night, you probably noticed things felt... different recently. The logo changed. The vibe shifted. Then, on March 5, 2025, the lights finally went out at the nate silver 538 website for good. ABC News pulled the plug, laying off the remaining staff and folding the brand into its general news archives.
Data journalism is hard. It’s expensive. And honestly, it’s rarely as profitable as media giants like Disney want it to be.
Most people still think Nate Silver is the guy behind the current 538 URL. He isn't. He hasn't been for a while. There’s this weird misconception that the website and the man are still one and the same, but that partnership ended in a messy, public divorce back in 2023. Silver walked away with his proprietary code—the actual "secret sauce" of the election models—and left the brand name behind.
The messy divorce: Nate Silver vs. ABC News
When Nate Silver left in May 2023, he didn't just pack up his desk. He took the intellectual property. This is the part that confuses casual readers: the nate silver 538 website was a licensed partnership. ABC owned the name "FiveThirtyEight," but Nate owned the math.
Think of it like a restaurant where the landlord owns the building but the chef owns the recipes. When the chef quits, he takes the cookbook with him. ABC was left with a famous kitchen and no idea how to make the signature dish. They hired G. Elliott Morris to build a brand-new model from scratch for the 2024 cycle, but the results were... controversial.
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Nate didn't stay quiet about it. He spent much of 2024 on his new Substack, Silver Bulletin, essentially dunking on his old website. He argued that the new 538 model relied way too much on "fundamentals" (like the economy) and not enough on actual polling data. It was a nerdy civil war. You had two different websites both claiming to be the spiritual successor of the original 538, and they were giving completely different odds.
Why the original 538 died in 2025
Why did Disney kill it? Money. It's basically always money.
Running a high-end data site requires a massive team of developers, designers, and statisticians. After Nate left, the traffic just wasn't the same. People followed the person, not the brand. By the time 2025 rolled around, ABC News decided it was easier to just do "data-lite" reporting rather than maintaining a standalone site that was constantly being criticized by its own founder.
- The 2008 Peak: Back when it was just a blog called "Poblano," the accuracy was legendary. 49 out of 50 states correct.
- The NYT Era: It became prestigious.
- The ESPN/ABC Era: It became a corporate entity.
The site basically moved from a garage startup to a corporate skyscraper, and in that transition, it lost the agility that made it famous. When the layoffs hit in 2023, two-thirds of the staff were gone in a single afternoon. It was a ghost town long before the domain finally started redirecting to ABC News's homepage.
Silver Bulletin: The new home for the math
If you're looking for the actual nate silver 538 website experience today, you won't find it at 538.com. You have to go to natesilver.net.
It's a lot more "Nate" now. Unfiltered. He writes about poker, sports betting, and demographic shifts with a level of snark that Disney probably wouldn't have allowed. Honestly, the Substack model suits him better. He doesn't have to answer to a corporate VP of Synergy; he just has to answer to his subscribers.
But there’s a catch. The old 538 was free (mostly). The new Silver Bulletin is behind a paywall for the deep-dive stuff. This represents a huge shift in how we consume political data. We’ve moved from "data for the masses" to "data for the people willing to pay $20 a month."
Accuracy and the 2016 trauma
We have to talk about 2016. Every time anyone mentions the nate silver 538 website, someone brings up the Trump victory.
"But he got it wrong!"
Actually, he didn't. 538 gave Trump a 29% chance of winning. Most other outlets gave him like 1% or 2%. In a world of statistics, 29% happens all the time. If you play Russian Roulette, you have a 16.6% chance of the bad thing happening. You wouldn't call that "impossible."
The problem was the perception of the data. People saw a 71% chance for Clinton and read it as 100%. Silver has spent the last decade trying to teach the public how to read a probability map, and frankly, it’s been an uphill battle. The 2024 election cycle only made this worse, as the "New 538" and "Silver Bulletin" diverged so sharply that the public just got "model fatigue."
Where do we go from here?
The era of the "one true model" is over. The shutdown of the nate silver 538 website as a standalone entity marks the end of a specific period of internet history. We are now in the age of the "Siloed Statistician."
You have Nate Silver at Silver Bulletin. You have G. Elliott Morris (formerly of 538) doing his own thing with "Strength in Numbers." You have the guys at Split Ticket and the Cook Political Report. The data is everywhere, but it's no longer centralized under one big, flashy banner.
How to actually use this information
If you're trying to track the next big election or just want to understand why the news looks the way it does, stop looking for a single website to give you "The Answer."
- Check the "Priors": Always look at whether a model is weighting "fundamentals" (history/economy) or "polls" (current sentiment) more heavily. Nate leans toward polls; the old 538 leaned toward fundamentals.
- Follow the Person, Not the URL: In 2026, talent is mobile. If you liked the 538 of 2012, follow Nate. If you liked the 538 of 2024, follow Elliott Morris.
- Ignore the Percentages: Don't look at "70% chance to win." Look at the "Tipping Point" states. That's where the real story is.
The death of the FiveThirtyEight website is a bummer for the nerds among us, but the math didn't die. It just moved house. You just have to know which doorbell to ring now.
To stay ahead of the curve, you should transition your bookmarks from the old ABC domain to the independent newsletters where the actual analysts now reside. Start by comparing the historical accuracy of the "Silver Bulletin" projections against the new mainstream aggregates to see which methodology aligns with your own risk tolerance for political forecasting.