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Significant Digits For Wednesday, April 24, 2019

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. For even more facts, figures and discussion, check out our live FiveThirtyEight Politics podcasts in Texas in May.


5-point drop

The latest Politico/Morning Consult poll shows a drop of 5 points in President Trump’s approval rating after the release of the Mueller report last week. The 39 percent rating equaled the lowest mark of his presidency in Politico/Morning Consult polling. But the poll also found that only 34 percent of voters believe that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings, also down 5 points from 39 percent early this year. [Politico]


8.2 hours a day

We sit. A lot. Because computers are fun to look at. According to research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, total sitting time for American adults and teens increased from about 6.4 hours a day in 2007 to 8.2 hours in 2016, he wrote, seated at his computer. [The Verge]


5 conservative justices

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case about adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Leading court watchers, including NPR’s Nina Totenberg and Adam Liptak of The New York Times, thought the court’s five conservative justices appeared united — and that the likely outcome would be a 5-4 vote in favor of the question. Critics argued that the question would undermine the accuracy of the census by discouraging immigrants from responding. [NPR, The New York Times]


3 runs for the presidency

Joe Biden will announce his 2020 presidential candidacy in a video on Thursday morning, ABC News has confirmed. It will be the third run for the high office for the former vice president and senator. In 1988, he dropped out early after reports of speech plagiarism, and in 2008, he dropped out after receiving less than 1 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucus. [ABC News]


96.6 score

Power and speed are a lethal combination in Major League Baseball, and my colleague Neil Paine has a new way to determine the sport’s top power-speed guy. Cody Bellinger of the Dodgers leads that list so far in 2019. He is in the 99th percentile for power and the 95th percentile for speed, and the harmonic mean between those two gives him a power-speed score of 96.6. [FiveThirtyEight]


At least 4 journalists

The investigative journalist Julia Angwin, formerly of ProPublica, was fired Monday from her role as editor in chief of The Markup, a nonprofit news site “dedicated to scrutinizing technology and its effects on society.” The site, set for a July launch, had raised more than $20 million in funding. Angwin wrote that The Markup’s executive director wanted a site devoted to advocacy rather than “data-centered journalism.” At least four journalists subsequently announced their resignations from The Markup in solidarity. [The New York Times]




News headlines today: April 24, 2019


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Oliver Roeder was a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied game theory and political competition.

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