Building a new home for data-driven political journalism

Independent, reader-funded media is the best way to safeguard unbiased, data-driven analysis for the public good. Become a member and support the mission.

In this post, I announce a new paid membership program for Strength In Numbers and write down my mission and goals for this data-driven news website. If you’ve found this work valuable so far, now’s the time to support it and help grow the business. If a paid membership is not right for you, the best way to help is to share this post everywhere online:

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Dear readers,

Over the past eight weeks, I’ve poured all of my time into building something new here: a space for rigorous, data-driven reporting on politics and public opinion that doesn’t chase clicks, play up the partisan narratives that increasingly dominate online conversations, bend to the fickle will of corporate media owners, or cower before the authoritarian forces attacking the press.

I have invited you to join a community that publicly tracks valuable political data and believes empiricism is the key to unlocking an accurate understanding of politics, political behavior, and the world.

And I’m working tirelessly to offer reporting and news analysis here that you won’t find anywhere else. Try to name another publication reporting as frequently and deeply on public opinion toward the Trump administration’s policy agenda, and how media attention is shaping our politics.

Or show me an indie newsroom that open-sources its polling and election models for maximum transparency. And find a Substack doing live election-night forecasting or its own original polling — or one that is having as good a time doing all of this work.

Strength In Numbers is, in a nutshell, here to help you be smarter about the news, using data. This is a place for data-driven, maximally truth-seeking, empirical journalism. And now is the time for this type of work to get a proper and sustainable funding model. So:

Today, this Substack enters its next phase. I'm officially free from my contract at Disney/ABC News, which shut down FiveThirtyEight in March but prevented us from taking new jobs until May 11. It’s May 12, so time to hit the big red button and launch this thing for real: As of today, I’m launching paid memberships to Strength In Numbers, and making a full-time job out of turning this Substack into a fully featured and sustainable independent news operation. My moonshot goal is for SIN to become big enough to sustain multiple research and editorial employees in a collaborative business, rivaling 538’s political data operation in accuracy, quality, and reach.

If you’ve found value in the work I've been publishing so far, I hope you’ll become a supporting member of this community. And if you're coming across this now for the first time, let me try to persuade you of the value of a paid subscription:

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Here are some of the things people have said about why paying for a membership to Strength In Numbers is worth it to them. (The post continues after the graphic.)

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Here's my short pitch to you:

Independent empirical journalism is urgently needed

The Swedish mathematician Andrejs Dunkels once said, “It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s harder to tell the truth without it.” The same can be said about data in the news. Numbers offer us an empirical foundation upon which to report stories and build a collective, reality-based narrative understanding of the world. Numbers root our worldview in the real world.

And independent, empirical journalism is not just important in general, it’s also fundamental to the democratic process. Accurate information about reality — including on such topics as the problems everyday Americans are facing, the state of the economy, what people want from their government, and the state of play in upcoming elections — is a precondition to rational political deliberation.

The necessity of accurate information rises with the stakes of our politics, which are now sky high — perhaps the highest they have been in America since Reconstruction.

Unfortunately, at exactly the moment that a reality-based worldview is utterly crucial, our understanding of each other is becoming increasingly unmoored from the data. Our fractured and partisan information environment is noisy — and in many segments, intentionally biased — and the incentives of corporate media no longer reward slow, deliberate analysis or numerical context. The new “chief strategy officer” of the Washington Post said this year that their new mission is to write stories “for all of America.” But when you write for everyone, you stand for nothing.

In America today, authoritarianism and partisan media particularly distorting our worldviews. When facts become polarized, people see different versions of reality itself.

There is a remedy. In my book, I write that public opinion polls in particular give us a tool to understand what the public needs from the government and assess the quality of the representation it receives. Polls help us understand the body politic and hold despotic leaders to account.

But polls are not the only data we need. All numbers are welcome in the new paradigm for journalism. I say more about this in my conversation with Paul Krugman here. The upshot is that I believe almost fanatically in the power of numbers to drive a spectrum of narratives — such as fostering a collective understanding of the world, on the good end, to spreading misinformation, on the bad end. As a journalist and particularly a political journalist, I believe we should use those numbers for good — that news should be rooted in facts, not ideological biases and editorial slant, and that we are here to serve the people.

From my experience in corporate media, I believe the best way to secure this mission is (a) to be accountable to the data above all else, and use it for the public good; and (b) to use a monetization strategy that is resistant to the malign influences of internet advertising, ideological ownership, and the fickleness of news mega-corporations. While we were able to achieve the former at times at FiveThirtyEight, Disney/ABC never let us do the latter.

At Strength In Numbers, I’m aiming to fill this hole. I offer you analysis that delivers clarity through data, elevates facts over spin, and provides tools that help all of us better understand where the country is headed. I promise to give you fact-based, no-punches-held political journalism that empowers the people. And along the way I hope we'll have a lot of fun building models of the world, both mental and statistical, together.

My full value proposition for readers is enumerated below. It includes commentary, fresh analysis, statistical tools (like polling averages and election forecasts), and a community devoted to open discussion of politics and elections — so long as facts come first. When public data is available, the community here will collect it, analyze it ourselves, and present it in an accessible format, making heavy use of data visualization, automation and open-sourcing of both data and code on platforms like GitHub. And when it's not, we'll gather data ourselves, including doing our own polls and academic survey experiments for a public audience.

I hope you'll join me on this journey and support independent, empirical journalism that clarifies our understanding of political reality and holds leaders accountable to facts and public opinion. I understand the value of your hard-earned money, and I will work every day to make this publication worthy of your time and attention.

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You can refer friends to Strength In Numbers to get a free trial of a paid membership.

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What a membership gets you

Over the past 6 weeks, I have been testing out a content strategy that combines long-form political analysis with quicker, news-driven and chart-focused posts with data analysis tools — such as polling averages and other data-first features. I think the following list provides a good balance between value and deliverability on my end.

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 a 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):

• 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 1-4x 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, paying subscribers 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 may 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 8:00 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 acquiring 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 bring on a research partner and pay freelance rates to members of the election 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!

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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, the incentives from corporate ownership, and algorithmic pollution of social media — this community is for you:

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 online and share this article with your friends and family!

Thanks to everyone who pledged financial support for this Substack while I got things moving. We’re going to put numbers back in the news!

Elliott

The original logo for my college blog, The Crosstab, where I got started writing about political statistics in 2015, and now the logo for this Substack!