Some observations on an extended election night.
(1) This was not a good night 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 RealClearPolitics average of recent polls showed Joe Biden with 51% of the popular vote and President Trump with 44%. As this is written, Biden has 50% of the tabulated national popular vote, a percentage that probably will rise as California’s results come dribbling in, but Trump has 48%. So the current 1.9 percentage point Biden plurality is far lower than the poll’s 7.1 percentage point Biden plurality.
