Some Of Our Best Work From 2019 Things we love that you might have missed.

For a newsroom like FiveThirtyEight’s, 2019 may as well been part of 2020. Such is the peril of covering electoral politics. But before 2020 actually arrives, we wanted to take a moment and remember some of our favorite features from the past year that the news cycle hasn’t rendered obsolete. There was a lot of good stuff! This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it’s a good place to start.

Politics

“Just because Republicans aren’t winning in cities doesn’t mean that no Republicans live there,” Rachael Dottle wrote earlier this year. Using historical vote data, she showed where every city’s Republican enclaves were, and which cities were the most politically segregated.

Clare Malone went home to Cleveland’s suburbs to examine how the 2016 election laid bare political differences among white Americans. Clare found that the fissures had been lying in wait for decades.

How do you measure a gerrymandered district? Ella Koeze and William Adler showed how math can help expose which districts have been manipulated along partisan lines.

Black politicians on the local level live different political lives than black politicians who want to be president. In August, Perry Bacon Jr. dug into why that is.

Activists who want to restrict access to abortion made some progress on the state level this year. Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux categorized hundreds of abortion restrictions to show why the anti-abortion movement is escalating.

Automatic voter registration is a recent hobbyhorse of progressive activists. But is it the panacea it’s made out to be? Nathaniel Rakich looked at what happened when 2.2 million people were automatically registered to vote.

We’re told over and over again that politicians need to appeal to centrist moderates if they hope to win nationally. But Lee Drutman’s analysis suggests that narrative isn’t true. The moderate middle is a myth.

Clare Malone spent weeks tailing former Vice President Joe Biden to understand a contradiction at the center of his presidential campaign: black voters provide a lot of his support, but one of his biggest vulnerabilities is his record on race.

Sports

We try and find overlap between politics and sports wherever we can, but that doesn’t mean we’re always good at knowing which is which. Earlier this year Tony Chow quizzed us on whether color commentary happened after a game or after a Democratic primary debate.

“Space Jam 2” is coming, and we’re hoping to be LeBron James’s casting director. We used our NBA metrics to cast the true successors to the cast of the original “Space Jam” movie.

It’s always tough to measure how good a defender is in the NFL. But Michael Chiang figured out a clever new way: look at where opposing offenses aren’t throwing.

Other gems