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.

Should this be the last daylight savings? The time zone shift is an excellent opportunity to look at daylight patterns across the country.

Caucuses have a distinct advantage over primaries, which are conducted by ballot: after an initial tally of candidates’ support, voters can realign themselves into new groups before the final count. This realignment process can provide valuable insight into the preferences of voters, and help us understand how the race might change if more candidates start to drop out.

Streaks are an important part of how we experience a place’s weather: it matters not just how hot it gets, or how much it rains, but also how long these kinds of weather stick around. Mathematically, one way to understand these patterns is through Markov chains. Thinking of weather in this way can reveal some interesting patterns, and confirm some stereotypes.

While we’re all familiar with the usual red-blue map of state partisan preference, things get a little more interesting when we look at states’ views on economic and social issues separately.

Corresponding to each point in and around the Mandelbrot set is a Julia set. If we start with a point near the origin, and move it in a circle around the main bulb of the Mandelbrot set, the series of corresponding Julia sets morph beautifully into one another.