Around May 15, 2026, ABC News redirected all FiveThirtyEight (538) articles on its website to the generic abcnews.com/politics page, making the full 538 archive inaccessible. The New York Times confirmed the removal on May 16, 2026. The action follows ABC News's March 2025 shutdown of 538 as part of broader Disney-era layoffs, but the May 2026 step is distinct: it removes the existing published archive of polling, forecasts, statistical analysis, and election coverage that the site produced from 2008 through early 2025.
The scrubbed material included 538's 2020 election forecasts, its tracking of Trump's first-term approval ratings, its statistical methodology for evaluating polls, the rolling generic-ballot averages that journalists, campaigns, and academics relied on for years, and Nate Silver's signature presidential forecasts. Hacker News observers documented the disappearance the same day. ABC has said it 'will continue to provide polling data and analysis outside of the 538 brand,' but the published historical record of the brand it shuttered is no longer available on the site that owned it. 538's former editor-in-chief G. Elliott Morris has spun up a Substack-style successor called Strength in Numbers; that publication is not the archive.
What makes this a controversy rather than a routine site cleanup is the documented value of the material being removed. 538's 2020 election forecasts and approval-rating archives are the published, citable, methodologically-disclosed record that journalists and academics use to evaluate claims about whether the 2020 election was anomalous and whether second-term Trump approval is rising or falling. The first set is the underlying material that contradicts the Acting AG's May 17, 2026 'ton of evidence' claim about a stolen 2020 election. The second is what reporters use to fact-check the administration's current self-assessment. Removing both at once, the week before the AG's claim, is a corporate decision that the published statistical record will no longer be available to make those comparisons. ABC declined to provide a substantive justification beyond the prior layoffs.