Reflecting On 9 Years Of FiveThirtyEight Memories
After all, you're my wonderwall.
Over the past week, I’ve heard from podcast listeners and readers about what FiveThirtyEight meant to them from a journalistic perspective. The site really did change how the media uses data to cover elections and society, and many of those changes will endure.
From inside the newsroom, FiveThirtyEight meant a whole lot more. At its peak, the newsroom was made up of about 40 nerds who rigorously debated story ideas in editorial meetings and then spent hours laughing with each other after work in Upper West Side bars. We periodically hosted teamwide karaoke, faced off in a bowling competition and went on a 2018 winter Olympics-inspired curling expedition. We became family.
Like the site’s impact on journalism more broadly, those bonds will endure. So, as we sit shiva this week, I want to pay tribute to that part of FiveThirtyEight (and also share some random fun memories from the ride of a lifetime). I spent my first unemployed Saturday morning since April 2013 scrolling through a decade of iPhone photos. This is what stuck out.
We launched the “FiveThirtyEight Elections” podcast in January of 2016 (it became known as the “Politics” podcast only after the 2016 election). The podcast scene was a totally different animal back then; the audio boom was just starting to take off after the success of “Serial.” That — in combination with a captivating Trump campaign and Nate Silver’s status as election oracle — made the “Elections” podcast basically an overnight success.
On January 21st, after only dropping a trailer episode, we were in the top charts on iTunes. Nate was the boldface name leading the charge, but the newsroom was always full of people I can only describe “characters.” And listeners fell in love with them.
Nate and Harry Enten may have cornered the nerd market, but there was only one crowd favorite: Clare Malone.
Clare always got the biggest applause at live shows and it wasn’t even close. Speaking of live shows, I think we all realized just the chord we had struck with the audience when, only four months after launching, we hosted a live show at Sixth & I in Washington, DC. There was a line around the block to get into the venue by the time we arrived to set up.
That also happened to be the day that John Kasich dropped out of the 2016 GOP primary and the day after Ted Cruz exited, leaving Trump the de facto Republican nominee. It kicked off a pattern of us coincidentally scheduling live shows for days when consequential news would drop. We were hosting a live show in San Francisco when the Brexit result came in and a show in Chicago the day the “p***y grabbing” tape came out.
That whole 2016 cycle was quite the ride, but one funny memory that sticks out is our meeting with Libertarian presidential candidate Garry Johnson, in what was basically a tech closet at the “Politicon” convention in Los Angeles.
I am paraphrasing here, but I remember Nate telling Johnson something like, “Your chances of winning are greater than zero and less than one percent.”
Of course, all the squabbling over election odds came to head in November. For longtime listeners, you’ll know that election week coincides with my birthday and so my dad sent birthday cupcakes to the office reminding us all to vote.
Listeners spoiled us that election. They sent cases of Red Bull, boxes of chicken wings and one liberal listener even sent me champagne, “to open when the election is called for Hillary Clinton.” Well, we all know how that went.
The political news cycle continued to rage over the coming years, but we managed to spend more time bonding as a podcast team and as a newsroom.
We went hiking during a work trip to Boise, Idaho. Yes, Nate did the entire hike in dress shoes…
We did team karaoke…
We got so inspired by the 2018 USA Olympic curling team that we invited them to record a podcast with us, despite knowing nothing about curling…
In fact, we even went on a group curling trip to the Ardsley Curling Club…
One of my favorite work trips was for a pair of live shows in Austin and Houston. Clare and I arrived a couple days early to visit the LBJ ranch and make friends with the cattle…
Like many of my former colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, Clare and I became real life friends. I guess our friendship was palpable enough on air that a listener even wrote in asking if we were having an affair. Dear listener, when a gay man and a straight woman love each other very much… Actually never mind, just watch “Will & Grace.”
As the 2020 Democratic primary heated up, we hit the campaign trail pretty hard. After a debate in Houston, I ran into Andrew Yang coming out of the mens bathroom in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. I’m rarely accused of being bashful, so I asked him if he’d record a podcast with us while we waited for the same flight back to New York. Our tech capabilities were limited so we all talked into our cellphones as we recorded ourselves in the voice memo app.
There were big plans for the podcast as we headed into 2020 election. There was talk of a docuseries showing viewers the behind the scenes life of the FiveThirtyEight podcast crew. The joke was that it would just be a live shot of Nate filling in a spreadsheet. Nonetheless, we got professional photos done of the whole team.
You have to wonder if the actual plan was to turn the podcast into a procedural drama in which one adept woman tries to wrangle three nerds into prosecuting a crime… or just smiling in unison.
Needless to say, the procedural drama never got made, neither did the docuseries, nor just about anything that didn’t involve spending copious amounts of time in one’s own apartment. Covid killed our network television dreams and at least some of our dignity.
In the early days of Covid, we didn’t have USB microphones, an online recording platform, or just about anything that today seems fundamental to podcasting. So, as Nate adroitly demonstrates, we improvised. Up until that point we had recorded basically every single podcast episode in person.
Makeshift offices like my fire escape took the place of our once buzzy newsroom. In many ways the pandemic marked the end of an era for FiveThirtyEight.
In-person life did eventually ramp back up for the 2022 midterms. We returned to 6th & I for what the organizers told us was their first sold out show since the pandemic began.
We got to celebrate a job well done after the 2022 midterm polls proved historically accurate. (Yeah, I’m still happy to fight about 2022 polling accuracy lol)
But the next time we would all meet up was under quite different circumstances. Shortly after the 2022 midterms, another era of FiveThirtyEight came to an end when much of the staff was laid off. A group of us gathered in the backyard of my apartment building to toast a great fucking run.
The era that came next took on a very different vibe. Those of us who remained were more integrated into the ABC News organization. I’d started doing some TV back in 2019, more in 2022 and a whole lot more in 2024. It was a much more solitary adventure than the period that came before, but there were parts that were still thrilling and fun.
I made friends with the ABC campaign embeds when we all got snowed in during the 2024 Iowa Caucuses and went to a rodeo at an arena connected to our hotel.
I also made some silly mistakes, like getting two coats of a spray tan before the 2024 Republican National Convention instead of just one, or maybe zero.
All told, I’m proud of the way I covered the 2024 election. And I’ve got a reel to prove it!
But all things must come to an end, and they did: on March 5th 2025.
We’d learned that FiveThirtyEight was shutting down from a leak to the Wall Street Journal the night before, so that morning I woke up, put my Fivey Fox t-shirt on, went for my morning run and waited for an HR invite to pop up on my calendar. It came and so we went… offline, off slack, off email and on to our next adventures.
But the memories endure 🫶
I hope you’ll join me on that next adventure by subscribing to this Substack.
-Galen
Found my new favorite substack
FiveThirtyEight shaped my perspective on politics and polling. I started listening as a 21 year old, in an attempt to self-soothe about the doom of American politics. I listened religiously - I think every ep for the last 8 years! I came to the Austin, TX live show during the 2018 midterms, because you all came to my office at my first big girl job! And now, at 29, I still feel doom, but I’m a bit more informed about why I feel that way. Galen, I will miss your witty, increasingly unhinged cold opens and the 538 team. Excited to be here - your substack is why I got on the app!