G. Elliott Morris

George Elliott Morris (born June 7, 1996) is an American data journalist who is best known for his work on election polling and predictive analytics. From 2018 to 2023, Morris was a data journalist for ''The Economist''. From 2023 until 2025, he was the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News including ''FiveThirtyEight''.

Early life

Morris was born in 1996. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, with undergraduate degrees in government and history. While still an undergraduate, Morris became the "breakout star of the 2018 election" for his project models correctly predicting that the Democrats would regain the House.

Career

After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Morris began working for ''The Economist''. In February 2020, Morris referred to bad 2016 U.S. presidential election predictions as "lying to people" and "editorial malpractice". He later said that polls in 2016 did not account for education, meaning college educated voters were over-represented, which overstated the lead that Hillary Clinton actually had.

In March 2020, Morris and ''The Economist'' published a forecast for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the first major model predicting the election's outcome. On August 1, 2020, his model gave Joe Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election, drawing criticism from Nate Silver of ''FiveThirtyEight'' who said: "I am not necessarily convinced. It's not just that polls could move. It's a question of, like, how well can pollsters predict turnout when the mechanics of voting have really changed?" Morris has had a public feud with Silver, leading to Silver blocking him on Twitter.

In May 2023, ABC News hired Morris to lead ''FiveThirtyEight'' as editorial director of data analytics following Silver's exit from the site. Morris and the entire ''FiveThirtyEight'' staff were laid off when the site was shut down in March 2025. Two months later, Morris announced a newsletter, ''Strength in Numbers'', which he said he intended to gradually expand into a successor to ''FiveThirtyEight''.

Bibliography

*''Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them'' (2022)

See also

* Nate Cohn

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, G. Elliott
Living people
American online journalists
Data journalists
American bloggers
American male journalists
American political commentators
American political writers
American statisticians
University of Texas at Austin alumni
The Economist people
1996 births
21st-century American journalists
21st-century American male writers