First, this was not a good week for conventional polling. My review in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal of a book on the history of “polling failures” took perhaps too positive a view of contemporary polling. I find it remarkable that polling has been as accurate as it has been in a country where the completion rate for pollsters’ contacts is below 10% — but it got worse this week. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls showed Joe Biden with more than 51% of the popular vote and Donald Trump with 44%. As this is written, Biden has 50% of the tabulated national popular vote, which will probably rise as California’s data comes dribbling in, but Donald Trump has 48%. So, the current 1.9% Biden plurality is far lower than the polls’ 7.2% Biden plurality.

The results in target states seem to have been off as well. The polls had Biden up 0.9% in Florida, far different from Trump’s 3.4% victory margin there. I have been dubious about the polling techniques of firms like Robert Cahaly’s Trafalgar, which produced numbers apparently closer to the election results so far than other pollsters in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But in an opinion climate where mass media and corporate political correctness has many Americans unwilling to state their opinions, there may be something to say for Cahaly’s unorthodox methods — and something to say against the more standard polling technique. There is, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York has argued, a hidden Trump vote. Most pollsters have not learned how to find it.

2. Donald Trump is running much better than almost everyone in the press and on Twitter expected. As I write, he has won or is ahead in the tabulated vote in 28 states with 280 electoral votes. He is clearly on his way to winning more popular votes than he did in 2016.

Democrats don’t seem likely to pick up the Senate majority that they seemed almost assured of gaining as recently as Tuesday morning. Republicans Corey Gardner and Martha McSally lost, as expected, in Colorado and Arizona, and Democrat Doug Jones lost, as expected, in Alabama. But as I write, Susan Collins is running well ahead of Trump and has a significant lead in Maine. She is a rare example of a politician who can get voters to split their tickets. Cal Cunningham, Chuck Schumer’s handpicked candidate in North Carolina, is trailing by 1.8%; I bet if Schumer if had known about Cunningham’s extramarital affairs, which were revealed and admitted during the campaign, the Senate minority leader would have picked another candidate. In Iowa, Republican incumbent Joni Ernst, having trailed in polls for months, won by a 7% margin. This is even larger than the prediction shown in last weekend’s Des Moines Register poll, conducted by star pollster Ann Selzer, about which I wrote a column entitled “The Disconcerting Iowa poll: A Trump Surge?”

Democrats’ hopes for a Senate majority now rest on Georgia’s two Senate seats. It’s now looking unlikely that incumbent David Perdue will fail to get 50% of the vote and therefore, under state law, have to face a runoff with Democrat Jon Ossoff on Jan. 5; Perdue currently holds 50% of the vote with 98% of precincts reporting. There will definitely be a runoff for the state’s other seat between appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock. Old-timers may recall that in 1992, when Georgia voted for Bill Clinton, Republican Paul Coverdell trailed incumbent Wyche Fowler in the general election 49% to 48%, but came back to win the runoff, with a sharply reduced turnout, by 51% to 49%. This year, with the Senate majority potentially at stake, turnout is likely to remain high.

Whatever the exact Senate result, it seems unlikely that the Senate will go along with the plans backed enthusiastically by leftist Democrats to pack the Supreme Court or to confer statehood on the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

4. Democrats have not done nearly as well as expected in House races. The Cook Political Report, with its fine record of assessing congressional elections, predicted that Democrats would increase their 232-seat majority in the House. Instead, at present, they’ve lost multiple seats and have gained only two, both in North Carolina, thanks to a favorable court redistricting decision.

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