Nate Silver Trashes ‘A**holes’ at ABC for Wiping FiveThirtyEight’s Wealth of Historical Data From Internet

Tanya Moutzalias/The Ann Arbor News-MLive.com Detroit via AP

Nate Silver, founder and former editor-in-chief of now-defunct political data analysis website FiveThirtyEight, trashed ABC executives as a “bunch of a**holes” for wiping the website’s trove of valuable historical data from the internet entirely.

The change was first reported by the award-winning website’s former election analyst Nathaniel Rakich, now managing editor at Votebeat U.S., who noted that FiveThirtyEight articles were now “completely offline” and that the page now redirects to “abcnews dot com/politics.” The data sets included electoral political analysis across multiple presidential and midterm elections as well as sports.

Rakich called the move a “needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge” in sharing the findings.

FiveThirtyEight was bought over by ABC in 2018 but axed by the company in March 2025 as part of sweeping cuts by parent company Disney.

Reacting to the news on X, Silver slammed ABC’s owners as “a**holes” and revealed that he had approached the company to buy up the IP only to be refused.

“They said they wouldn’t sell at any price because I’d criticized their management of the brand,” he said, in a move he characterized as “vindictiveness.”

The website began as an independent polling aggregation platform in 2008 before becoming a licensed feature at The New York Times. In 2013 it was acquired by ESPN before being transferred to ABC News.

Silver remained the face of the publication until his own departure from ABC News in May 2023.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!