We have some big news to share! FiftyPlusOne is teaming up with MS NOW to power the media giant’s polling and election coverage in the final weeks of this year’s midterm elections.
Starting today, October 8th, our polling averages, forecasts, and interactive tools will be included in MS NOW’s election coverage, both on air and online, through the midterms and beyond. MS NOW and its partners under the Versant Media Group umbrella will publish bespoke versions of our graphics, built by FiftyPlusOne’s team, for polling averages of federal and statewide general elections, President Donald Trump’s approval rating, the generic congressional ballot, and more. Here’s our Trump approval polling average on MS NOW’s website.
Here’s Deadline’s coverage of the deal and MS NOW/Versant’s press release.
Under Katie Marriner, co-founder of FiftyPlusOne and our Head of Visualization and Engineering, we will also produce bespoke interactive data tools for MS NOW, including an upcoming interactive allowing users to explore the impact of different types of polling error using our election forecasting models. G. Elliott Morris, co-founder and Head of Analytics at FiftyPlusOne, will contribute a biweekly column to MS NOW exploring polling and demographic data before November, and cover the results of the election through the end of the year. Mary Radcliffe, co-founder of FiftyPlusOne and our Head of Research and poll extraordinaire, will provide data and research for our new outputs, work with MS NOW journalists to vet pollsters, and continue to do the painstaking work of gathering (almost) every public poll in America to feed into our systems.
MS NOW is FiftyPlusOne’s exclusive national news partner. (Other outlets remain free to cite our public averages, and our work for existing data clients is unaffected.)
Why we’re doing this
We started FiftyPlusOne in September 2025 because we think the public deserves rigorous, transparent analysis of polls and election data, and we developed a business model that could safeguard that public good for the long haul. Our site is nonpartisan, maximally transparent, and built to show readers both what the polls say and how much uncertainty surrounds them.
Our goal here at FiftyPlusOne has always been to help people understand where public opinion actually stands, with honesty about uncertainty and without noise or spin. Our new partnership with MS NOW lets us reach tens of millions more people, and we’re thrilled to work with a newsroom that believes in the power of data as much as we do.
If you’re a reader of our website and Substack, rest assured nothing will change for you: our averages and forecasts stay free, and none of our journalism is moving behind a paywall. Every average and forecast you see on MS NOW will be the same one you see here, built the same way (just with slightly flashier presentation) and with the same data. MS NOW has no control over our methodology, data, or editorial decisions. This is a partnership, and our models remain fully independent and published in full at domains we control.
So keep an eye out for our numbers on MS NOW programming and its website between now and Election Day. We’re very excited about what is possible with a media partner of this scale, and looking forward to building even more informative data products for 2028 and beyond!