How I got my dream job at FiveThirtyEight

And what I might do next.

Back in 2012—when it was still in its New York Times era—FiveThirtyEight had a feature called Reads and Reactions. Essentially, Micah Cohen—who was one of just two FiveThirtyEight employees at the time, along with a guy named Nate Silver—rounded up some good pieces of data journalism from around the internet (the “reads”) and other articles engaging with what Nate had written that week (the “reactions”). The column would often come with an invitation: If you had something you wanted to be featured in Reads and Reactions, just send it along to Micah on Twitter.

I may have abused the privilege. At the time, I was writing a blog called Baseballot, which covered—you guessed it—baseball and politics from a data-y angle. Obviously, that blog was heavily inspired by Nate’s work,¹ and I dreamed of a career doing what he and Micah did. So like that annoying freshman in your college seminar, I kept overeagerly sending all my posts to Micah on Twitter. On January 16, 2012, it paid off with, of all things, a two-part analysis of attendance at Marlins games. “Nathaniel Rakich, at the Baseballot blog,” Micah wrote in that week’s column, “made a statistical argument for the Miami Marlins’ new ballpark boosting next season’s attendance (then played devil’s advocate to himself).”

It was the first time my work ever appeared in FiveThirtyEight. To my eternal gratitude, it would not be the last. After the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight—now a full-fledged news site operating under the auspices of ESPN—put out a call for freelance politics writers, and I wrote then-politics editor Micah an email. “You may or may not remember picking up a few of my posts…” it read. “Of course I remember you!” Micah replied—and under his mentorship, I started contributing political analyses to the site in early 2017. When my first article published and led the homepage, it was the biggest thrill of my professional life.

I knew I loved FiveThirtyEight’s style of writing and analysis, but I soon came to discover I loved the people there, too, and the rigor they put into their work. (A prime example: Right up until the very end, FiveThirtyEight had an editing step devoted to checking every fact in the article.) I started writing for them more and more frequently, and in 2018, they hired me full time as an elections analyst. I wrote about special elections, the 2018 midterms, the 2020 Democratic primary, impeachment, the way COVID-19 affected election administration, and of course, the 2020 general election. I traveled to debates and early primary states like an honest-to-God reporter. In 2021, I got promoted to senior elections analyst and played a leading role in major projects like our redistricting tracker and comprehensive database of election deniers on the ballot. I started appearing on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast and shooting fun little videos.

After our politics editor moved on to a new gig, I became the acting politics editor for the 2022 midterms—basically, I made sure we were covering everything that was worth covering in that roller-coaster campaign. That was just supposed to be temporary, but in April 2023, layoffs devastated FiveThirtyEight; over half the staff was cut, including all of the non-politics writers and all of senior management. ABC News² tapped me to co-lead what was left of the newsroom (around 15 people) alongside Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux³ and, eventually, G. Elliott Morris. For the last two years, I oversaw 538’s entire editorial operation from soup to nuts—setting coverage priorities, managing all our reporters and editors, and maintaining a regular publishing schedule.

That all ended on Wednesday, when ABC News shuttered 538 and laid off the remaining staff, including myself. It’s a serious loss for political journalism: Even though other outlets have emulated FiveThirtyEight by doing more data-driven political analysis, 538 was still the only outlet doing the legwork of actually assembling a comprehensive polling database; all the polling averages you saw at places like the Times last cycle were powered by our data. But it’s also a loss for those of us who worked there—not just because we suddenly don’t have an income, but because working there made us smarter and better at our jobs every day.

Personally, I’m not sure what I will do next. Ideally, I’d do exactly what I was doing at FiveThirtyEight: writing empirical analyses of elections and/or managing a team that does so. If you have an opportunity for me to do so, please reach out. But I’m not in a rush; to be honest, I’m still pretty burnt out from the 2024 election, so I’m going to take some time off before making any decisions. And one thing I might do is give this Substacking thing an honest-to-goodness try. If you hit that subscribe button, in the coming months, you’ll either be getting a lot more frequent newsletters or you’ll be the first to know where you can keep following my work.

I’d like to finish by thanking everyone who read, watched, listened to, used, or shared FiveThirtyEight’s work over the last several years. It’s been incredible to see how big and passionate of an audience there is for the, let’s face it, extremely nerdy work that we did. Your interest kept us around as long as we lasted, and it’s been so touching to read all your tributes to FiveThirtyEight on social media. I’ve really appreciated engaging with so many of you over the years—even the (constructive) critics!—and my favorite thing in the world is when someone tells me that FiveThirtyEight inspired them to get interested in politics or involved in journalism. I’m deeply sorry that it’s gone now, but there’s no undoing the smart, geeky community we’ve built together as readers and journalists. I’m looking forward to staying a part of that.

1. Before starting FiveThirtyEight and writing about politics, Nate analyzed baseball for Baseball Prospectus.

2. In 2018, we switched from being part of ESPN to being part of ABC News; both entities are part of the Walt Disney Company, though.

3. Now the polling editor at the Associated Press.