Crooked Media has bought the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast. It returns on 9 September as Still Counting

Crooked Media has bought a podcast that its previous owner switched off eighteen months ago. On Tuesday 25 August the company confirmed it has acquired FiveThirtyEight Politics, the data-driven US politics show ABC News closed down in March 2025, and will relaunch it on 9 September as Still Counting, with Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Galen Druke all back at the microphones.

The reunion is the headline. The transaction underneath it is the more interesting part. A broadcaster treated a podcast brand as a cost line and wrote it off; a podcast company decided the same brand, and the same three people, were worth paying for. Our reading is that this is the clearest sign yet that an established podcast has a resale value of its own, separate from whichever media company happened to be paying for it.

What has been confirmed

The deal was first reported on 25 August by Variety, which described it as an acquisition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast by Crooked Media. Neither side has disclosed what was paid, and neither has said whether the deal covers the show’s back catalog or only its future.

What is not in dispute is the shape of the new show. Crooked Media’s own page for Still Counting is already live and says the podcast will run weekly on Wednesdays from 9 September, across the major podcast apps and on YouTube, covering “everything from elections to betting markets to AI” with “rigorous analysis and a few hot takes, but no spin and no false sense of certainty”.

The three hosts confirmed it themselves the same morning. Clare Malone posted that Still Counting, with her, Nate Silver and Galen Druke, arrives weekly from 9 September “in partnership with Crooked Media” — her wording, notably, is partnership rather than sale. Druke told his Substack readers the same thing and pointed listeners to the show’s YouTube channel.

Silver’s own framing, given to Variety, is a pitch as much as a description: “There’s a ton of data and information coming at us every day, and a surprising amount is misunderstood or under-explained.” Crooked Media chief executive Lucinda Treat said the three hosts “have spent years doing exactly that, bringing rigorous analysis and sharp perspective to the biggest questions in politics”.

The feed is not vaporware either. A trailer went up on 24 August and the show’s channel page on Audioboom is public, which tells you where the hosting and the ad representation are likely to sit.

What ABC actually threw away

Silver started FiveThirtyEight as a blog in 2008. ESPN bought it in 2013, it moved to sister network ABC News in 2018, and Silver left in 2023; he now writes the Silver Bulletin newsletter on Substack. In March 2025, in another round of Disney cost-cutting, ABC News shut the FiveThirtyEight site and its podcasts and laid off the remaining staff.

That decision made sense on a spreadsheet and looks worse every month. What ABC was carrying was a small editorial team and a website. What it was also carrying, without obviously valuing it, was a weekly listening habit built over the better part of a decade and three presenters whose names travel with the analysis.

That is the asset Crooked Media has picked up, and it is an unusually cheap thing to restart. A television format needs a studio, a commission and a slot. A weekly politics podcast needs three people, a Wednesday and a feed. The likely consequence is that other dormant podcast brands sitting inside cost-cutting newsrooms are now worth a phone call rather than a write-off, and we would expect more of these deals before the year is out.

The tension Crooked has bought into

Crooked Media is not a neutral home. It was founded by four former Obama staffers, and its flagship show Pod Save America has never pretended to be anything other than a progressive political program. Still Counting, by its own description, sells the opposite: numbers first, no spin, no false certainty.

Both sides plainly know this, because both have led with the word rigour. Our reading is that the arrangement works commercially precisely because of the mismatch: Crooked reaches an audience it already has, and buys access to one it does not — poll-watchers, betting-market types and the politically homeless who would never subscribe to a show hosted by former White House staff.

The risk runs the other way. A data show’s only real product is the perception that it will publish the number it finds rather than the number its audience wants. What nobody has confirmed yet is whether editorial independence is written into the deal or simply understood, and that is the question worth asking of everyone involved over the next few months.

Why the date matters more than the deal

The 9 September launch lands roughly eight weeks before the US midterm elections on 3 November. That is not an accident, and it is the part of this that other publishers should be reading closely.

Election cycles are when political podcasts acquire audiences they then keep for years. A show that arrives in September has a run of polling, debates, early voting and one very long results night in which to convert curious listeners into subscribers. A show that arrives in December has none of that. The likely effect is a crowded autumn: expect several relaunches, spin-offs and daily editions timed to the same window.

Video is part of the plan from day one rather than an afterthought, with the show listed on YouTube alongside the audio feed. That is now standard for anything launching with commercial ambitions, but it also sets a cost floor — a weekly video-first politics show is a materially more expensive thing to run than the audio version FiveThirtyEight was making in 2019.

Money is the part nobody is discussing publicly. Political content remains awkward for a slice of the advertising market, which points to a show leaning on Crooked’s membership and live business rather than the open ad marketplace. That is our inference from how Crooked already operates, not something the company has stated.

What to watch from 9 September

The first practical test is unglamorous: subscribers. A revived brand launching into a new feed starts from zero, whatever the name on the artwork, and the gap between how many people remember a show and how many actually press follow is where most revivals quietly fail.

The second is whether this turns out to be a one-off or the first of a run. If Still Counting works, the model — buy a brand a legacy broadcaster has abandoned, reattach the original hosts, relaunch into an election — is repeatable, and there is no shortage of switched-off podcast brands sitting in the archives of American media companies.

For listeners the effect is simpler and mostly good: a well-made politics show that stopped existing is coming back, ahead of an election, on the platforms people already use. If you are building out a listening list before November, it is worth putting alongside the rest of the politics podcasts worth following this autumn, and judging it on whether the numbers still lead the argument.

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