The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database
When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance.
“Collecting and maintaining a database of public polls is a lot of work, requiring diligence, meticulousness, and dealing with constant complaints about edge cases from readers and pollsters,” Silver wrote. “But it’s also a public service. Polling has its challenges, but I believe it’s vital in a democracy.”
Luckily, the data has been saved: The New York Times is picking up where FiveThirtyEight left off and has “begun a new effort to track public opinion surveys, starting by collecting all polls on President Trump’s job approval…building on the work of the politics website 538,” William P. Davis, the Times’ director of election data analytics, wrote Monday.
Our goal is to ensure that this resource, which is a foundational tool for many journalists and researchers, remains updated long-term. The data will be made available free for anybody to use as they wish, so long as they provide attribution to The Times. (If you’re still using data collected by 538, you may still need to give it attribution as well.)
To make the transition as easy as possible, we are providing the data in about the same format as 538 did. There are some differences, which are noted at the bottom of this page.
You can see the Times’ polling tracker here.