I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.

I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something.

This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.