2022 In Review

33 Cool Charts We Made In 2022

In 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s visual journalists covered the midterm elections, the end of Roe v. Wade and sports stories ranging from the World Cup to changes in Major League Baseball’s pitch timing rules. Here are some of the most interesting — and weird and colorful and complicated — charts we made in the last 12 months.

Charts are grouped by topic but are not in any particular order beyond that. Click any of them to read the story featuring that chart.

Politics

Sports

Science

Soon after the midterm elections, we began our regular process of evaluating how FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts performed. We quickly discovered an error: We were using out-of-date data for one important source used in the Deluxe version of our forecast. Although this had little impact on the topline numbers for each party’s chance of controlling a chamber of Congress, it had modest-to-medium-sized effects on some individual races in the Deluxe forecast. It had no effect on the Lite or Classic forecasts.

The Deluxe forecast differs from the Classic and Lite forecasts in that it accounts for race ratings published by three groups: The Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections. After adding new Inside Elections ratings for House races in late September, we noticed what we thought was an anomaly in the forecast. To investigate, we disabled automatic updates for that site’s House ratings. We determined that the election model was running correctly, but we neglected to re-enable automatic updates from Inside Elections. As a result, Inside Elections ratings for House races were frozen in time as of late September. (To be clear, this was FiveThirtyEight’s error and there is no fault whatsoever with Inside Elections or their ratings.)

If we had run the model with the updated ratings, the final forecast would still have shown Republicans with a 84 percent chance of winning the House, the same as our final forecast with the out-of-date ratings. And Republicans would have had a 55 percent chance of winning the Senate, instead of 59 percent. (Even though Inside Elections ratings for Senate and gubernatorial races were being updated, because of the way that the model works, there were some very minor, indirect effects on Senate and gubernatorial Deluxe forecasts as well.)¹

Only one individual race forecast shifted by more than one category as a result of the error (e.g., a race shifting from “lean Republican” to “lean Democrat,” skipping over “toss-up”), and a number did have a one-category shift, as listed in the table below. 

Not listed in that table is the House race in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, which did not see a change in its categorization. It was won by Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who was listed with only a 2 percent chance in the forecast. If updated Inside Elections ratings had been used, she would have had a 4 percent chance instead. So the race was a major upset either way — although one should keep in mind that when a model issues forecasts for 435 House districts, some low-probability upsets are to be expected if the model is calibrated properly.

We are reviewing our internal processes for how to better identify errors of this nature. One lesson is that smaller errors are sometimes harder to detect than larger ones. If our forecast in a high-profile race such as Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate election had differed dramatically from the consensus, we would quickly have investigated it. Small anomalies in a series of mostly low-profile House races are harder to detect with the “eye test,” however. We also strongly appreciate reader feedback, including alerting us to potentially anomalous forecasts. While our models are fairly complex, the forecasts should still follow logically from the inputs. If a given forecast is hard to explain, it may reflect a problem with the underlying data or with the way that we’re processing it.

In evaluating how FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts did — for example, comparing our performance against other forecasts — we would recommend that you use the original, as-published forecasts, even though they were using outdated Inside Elections ratings. We of course would have preferred to use the updated ratings, but we don’t think we should get credit for a mistake that we only identified after the fact. In conducting our own assessment of our forecast once all race calls are finalized, we will show you four versions instead of our usual three: Lite, Classic, Deluxe (as published) and Deluxe (corrected).

A complete set of files showing what our final Deluxe forecast would have shown given updated Inside Elections ratings can be found here.

FiveThirtyEight regrets the error. We appreciate the time you spend on the site, and we hope that you found our midterm elections coverage valuable despite it.

Going into the playoffs, our NBA model wasn’t particularly high on the Dallas Mavericks’ chances of making a deep run. We gave Dallas only a 37 percent chance of beating the Utah Jazz in the first round and a 12 percent chance of making the Western Conference finals. But that was before Luka Dončić returned from injury — and then went nuclear in the playoffs, averaging 31.5 points, 10.1 rebounds, 6.6 assists and 1.9 steals per game with a 58.7 true shooting percentage and an absurd +14.9 RAPTOR plus/minus rating. Now the Mavs are on the cusp of an NBA Finals appearance, and as of this morning our model was very high on Dallas’s chances.

A little bit too high, as it turns out.

As a quick refresher, our RAPTOR projections incorporate an adjustment for playoff performance based on a player’s career RAPTOR ratings in the playoffs versus the regular season, with an emphasis on more recent seasons. But after digging around earlier today, we found that we had been implementing this in a clumsy way for our real-time projections, such that they were adjusting more than we intended for 2022 playoff performance.

This was most noticeable in the case of Dončić, who is having a historically great postseason. Before fixing the bug in our playoff adjustment, Dončić was appearing as nearly a +13 points-per-100-possessions player, relative to league average. If that was indeed his true talent, he would be on par with Michael Jordan or LeBron James at their peaks — and he has played even better than that so far in the playoffs. But a player’s RAPTOR playoff adjustment should evolve very slowly over time, since we operate under the strong belief that most players play roughly the same in the playoffs as they do in the regular season, with a few exceptions. With only 857 career playoff minutes under his belt, Dončić hasn’t quite played at this level in the postseason long enough to justify a LeBron-like adjustment, much less a playoff adjustment several times larger than any player in NBA history.

Dončić’s playoff adjustment is now a much more reasonable +0.6 on top of his already great regular-season rating. That means the model is still comparatively bullish on Luka and the Mavs (we give them a 54 percent chance to make the Finals), just not as much as it was before we discovered this bug. Though if Dončić keeps playing as well as he did against the Jazz and Suns, no playoff adjustment will really matter in the end. 

Check out our latest NBA predictions.