Welcome to Strength In Numbers!
Strength In Numbers is a data-driven news website that provides regular analysis of national politics and elections in the United States. In a nutshell, we are trying to help you be smarter about the news, using data.
This Substack is written by me, G. Elliott Morris, a data-driven journalist and author based in Washington, DC. I was formerly a Senior Data Journalist for The Economist, and for two years was the Editorial Director of Data Analytics for ABC News, where I ran FiveThirtyEight’s data journalism until Disney closed us down in March 2025. I write about politics, public opinion polling, and democracy from an editorially independent, empirical angle.
In terms of content, you should expect a lot of what I used to publish at 538, including aggregating polls and economic data and forecasting elections with transparent methodologies. But I also publish more frequent analyses of news and electoral trends, and Strength In Numbers even has its own poll to unearth fresh findings about public opinion in America. Subscribers can even submit their own topics for us to ask about.
Free subscribers can expect posts around once or twice a week. Paying members get more frequent dispatches about news and public opinion, up to 5x a week during election season.
This is a place for data-driven, maximally truth-seeking empirical journalism. If you believe in the power of data (ahem, the strength in numbers), please join our community:
Why Subscribe?
Paying members of Strength In Numbers get exclusive access to in-depth political analysis, enhanced polling data and forecasts, and live election-night modeling, as well as opportunities to engage directly with me and the community (you can create threads in the Strength In Numbers substack chat). Free subscribers still receive weekly chart-based articles, original polling results (including subscriber-submitted questions), and data-driven news analysis.
The goal is to keep the most valuable public-interest content free while offering additional insights, tools, and interactions to support the newsletter’s sustainability.
Here’s a full enumeration of benefits to free and paid memberships:
All readers of Strength In Numbers get (1-2x/week):
Evidence-based analysis of politics, economics, and the news. The bread and butter of my work is “news analysis” pieces that explore nuanced topics within politics and political psychology using statistical models and data visualization. I dive into the crosstabs myself, boot up the academic data, and come to objective conclusions about the issues animating political discourse today.
One weekly chart-based article about the latest political news in the U.S., and sometimes globally. The idea is to provide something you can’t get anywhere else. And I know your inboxes are full already, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
Results from a monthly poll on U.S. politics, including at least one topic written by a subscriber. Starting in May, Strength In Numbers will have its own poll, and by signing up to receive emails you get the chance to submit a question that gets picked for a representative sample of U.S. adults.
Polling aggregation and election forecasts with open-source methodologies, including code. Averaging and forecasting are key tools for understanding the signal in the polling noise, and how precise those signals are. But both pollsters and forecasters have suffered from loss of credibility recently. Transparency is one way to enhance trust. I will publish topline forecasts for a public audience, and save crosstab and finer-resolution models for paying subscribers.
Other data-driven products about economics and politics, such as the index of economic growth that I use to forecast election outcomes, and my Cost of Ruling Index that measures how bad the political environment is for the incumbent party. And I’ve worked on other potential products, too, like a calculation of how much excess value each Congressional member provides to their party. (Suggestions for other trackers are welcome.)
Paid members to Strength In Numbers also get (2-4x/wk):
Access to a private Discord server to discuss news and political data.
The satisfaction that comes with supporting the public mission of this outlet. I have to pay my bills, and you make this analysis possible to do publicly and independently. Thank you!
More frequent subscriber-only analyses of elections and polling trends, cutting through the noise and confusion of daily media cycles. These are short daily-ish articles (what some people would call “takes”) where you get my analysis and opinions on important issues. These are posted to a paywalled section of the Strength In Numbers website, and exclusive for people who support the mission of this publication.
Exclusive analysis of Strength In Numbers polling data using advanced modeling and other tools. Through statistical analysis of public data and my own polling microdata, I unearth insights that are too complex to fit in general-public releases or otherwise take too much work to be released for free.
Live election-night models and threads about results. For major contests with comprehensive county-level results, I will produce benchmarks for each candidate ahead of the election and compare results on the night of to figure out who is ahead. This method usually identifies the likely winner of an election before major networks can call the race.
Enhanced forecasts and polling averages, including crosstab-level averages and election forecast data at the state and local levels. I may make presidential forecasts and toplines free, while paywalling Senate and House forecast details, for example.
Opportunities to engage directly with me and a community of informed readers who value thoughtful, evidence-based political analysis. Readers participate in an active chat here on Substack, where paying subscribers can start any discussion with other readers. I plan to engage with subscribers personally in other ways too — likely with Q&A/mailbag posts.
Timing
The plan is that subscribers will receive emails from me 1-3x a week on average, depending on the news and your subscription level: On Monday, I may publish a short subscriber-only “take” to add context to any news that happened over the weekend, when needed; Tuesday morning, all paying subscribers will receive a data-driven analysis around the length of a typical newspaper column; During election season, Wednesday mornings (sometimes late Tuesday night) are reserved for coverage of the previous day’s contests, which I paywall halfway through the piece for premium subscribers; Thursday is reserved for me to code, complete other heads-down analysis work, and tend to business needs; and on Friday, all readers get a visual look at topical news or discourse, which I call our Chart of the Week.
The monthly poll will typically be released on Wednesday, but can move around depending on news needs and response rates. On poll weeks, the Tuesday article is often replaced with Wednesday poll results.
Other than pressing news analysis, I try to send all newsletters in the morning — usually by 8:30 a.m. Eastern. The paywalled subscriber-only Takes get posted at random hours, whenever I’m ready with them. Until I figure out a better solution, podcasts and live chats will be conducted ad-hoc and promoted in advance on social media so you don’t miss the action.
Price and pay transparency
To start, I’ve set the price of a Strength In Numbers subscription at $9 a month USD, or $7.50 a month if you opt for the annual membership. I think this is a reasonable starting price, and it has done well in testing and comparison shopping. Generally, it is cheaper than competitor data-driven sites (some political intelligence websites are $350 a year!) while reflecting (1) the added value that my data science skills bring to political coverage, (2) the frequency and quality of content available here, and (3) the access subscribers get to a community of like-minded data/election nerds, including other Strength In Numbers employees.
Substack also offers a higher subscription tier called a “founding membership” intended to provide extra perks to super-fans. I use this tier to support the bigger costs at Strength In Numbers, including for goods and services such as original polling data and computational infrastructure for automating trackers. Founding members also get a special Q&A space for streamlined access to my inbox — as well as my gratitude for supporting the public mission of this publication. If SIN gets enough founding members (probably around 100), I should be able to pay freelance rates to members of the elections analysis community to contribute their own analysis to the site. That would be a first step to fulfilling my ultimate aspiration for Strength In Numbers, which is to become a (monetized and profitable) replacement for all the political work we did at 538.
Apart from the founding members, I’m optimistically hoping to convert about 6% of the audience to paying subscribers, which Substack tells me is above average across all their newsletters. Because political writing is so seasonal, I expect this number will unfortunately be a little lower, closer to 4%. I invite you to prove me wrong!
Join a community for data-driven journalism
If you’re someone who cares about understanding politics and public opinion deeply and objectively — without the noise of traditional news coverage, the biases of punditry, and algorithmic pollution of social media — this community is for you. If you’d like to sign up for a free subscription, or already have and want to become a paid member, click this button:
If you are not interested in all the frills of a paid subscription, or you would simply like to make a one-time contribution directly to the Strength In Numbers business account, you can send a donation via Stripe using the button below. Donations are used to support operating costs, like salaries and servers:
And if none of these options are right for you financially, the best thing you can do is post about this publication and share this article with your friends and family!
About me/this publication
You probably know me from my work forecasting elections or aggregating polls for ABC News, FiveThirtyEight, and The Economist. I’m a professional data scientist and political journalist, and trained as a political scientist and pollster.
In 2022, I authored the book Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, a comprehensive exploration of public opinion polling and its vital role in democracy. The book delves into the history, methodology, and impact of polls, advocating for their continued relevance in capturing the public's voice. I also do a good amount of speaking to public and private clients, and there’s a good chance you’ve come across some of my slides on polling and forecasting too.
I plan to do similar stuff here. I’ve been putting together statistical models that cut through the noise of traditional news coverage for more than a decade, and consider this one of my primary comparative advantages.
However, I plan to do a lot more than just make predictions here. When I graduated from the Government, History, and Computer Science programs at the University of Texas at Austin, I was on the fence about studying American politics, methodology, and public opinion professionally via a PhD program. I am not an academic, but have held on to that approach to my work in other pursuits: I do not make predictions for prediction’s sake, but as one component of a bigger strategy to understand complex systems and bring key insights to a public audience.
Through my book, writing, and forecasting, the unifying thread of all my work so far is that data offer us (somewhat) objective tools to improve democracy and representation for the average person. That means monitoring public opinion about our leaders and parsing polls on the public’s priorities, but also understanding where that data comes from and extracting insights from it responsibly. It means writing about government data when it disappears, monitoring new academic scholarship about political behavior and the health of our republic, reporting on people in the real world and looking for data that identify pain points for people so leaders can direct resources to help them.
Since starting this blog in 2018, I have aimed to demystify the intricacies of polling, public opinion, and political science. This blog equips readers with the tools to critically assess data, recognize biases, and understand the nuanced realities that data reflect. By promoting data literacy, these pieces encourage a more informed and engaged citizenry capable of navigating the complexities of modern democracy.
Contributors
I am still figuring out exactly what form Strength In Numbers will take once it is fully grown, and one potentiality is that this becomes a collaborative effort with guest writers and cross-posting from other Substacks. Feel free to send pitches to me via email.
By “non-partisan“ I do not mean that I will not publish things that reflect poorly on one party, but rather, that the analysis does not start in an empirically unwarranted fashion from a partisan perspective, even if conclusions end up alienating one side of the aisle.
