It’s that time again: presidential election forecasts are cropping up left and right. And they all point in the same direction, with varying degrees of confidence. Until the election, there will be arguments over which model is “best”—arguments completely uninfluenced by the participant’s own political leanings, of course. After the election, assuming we still have a country, a much smaller group of people will want to look back and decide which model ultimately was closest to the actual results.

Suppose—hypothetically—that you find yourself one evening, early in the second summer of our pandemic, reading your email, when you open up an advertisement for discounted train tickets.

Some unions have relatively even local memberships, others have huge disparities in size between their largest and smallest locals. Why? And can we measure it?

In a place where religious polarization is stronger than political polarization (though they are intertwined), how does the redistricting process look? Are the boundaries fair? Random simulations can provide an answer.

Use this tool to game out various scenarios, or to make real-time election-night forecasts for the presidential race as the results roll in.

Last week, Biden outspent Trump on Facebook by more than a 2-to-1 margin. But per-state spending has little to do with how competitive each state is, and everything to do with how many supportive voters live there.

All of the numbers floating around about the coronavirus can obscure the one simple fact that we must all remember if we are to be disciplined enough in our social distancing: this pandemic is deadly serious, and if we don’t continue to take drastic action, at an individual and societal level, then someone you know will probably die.