Erin Scott/Reuters

Birds fly over the White House at dusk, the day after a presidential election victory was called for former Vice President Joe Biden, in Washington, Nov. 8, 2020. President Donald Trump has refused to concede.

The Trump White House’s decision to block routine actions that would facilitate a transition to a Biden administration has added a new layer of turmoil to an already turbulent time. 

But this is the Trump era, when many norms of governance have already fallen by the wayside. 

President Donald Trump has yet to concede the Nov. 3 election to former Vice President Joe Biden, whom major media have projected as the winner. In addition, President Trump is encouraging legal challenges to the vote counts in key battleground states, which Republicans are pursuing.

The rub comes in the Trump administration’s decision to refrain, via the administrator of an obscure government agency, from “ascertaining” that Mr. Biden is the “apparent successful candidate.” By law, “ascertainment” is not a formal concession of the election; it’s a declaration that helps smooth the transition to a potential new administration. 

By failing to take this legal step, the Trump administration has blocked the Biden team from accessing federal funds, placing transition personnel in government agencies, and beginning to process incoming personnel, including security clearances. Mr. Biden also has yet to receive a presidential daily briefing, a document containing classified intelligence analysis. The implications for national security can be especially profound. 

“This is shaping up to be the most fraught transition in modern history,” says Rebecca Lissner, a scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies and co-author of the book “An Open World.” 

The pandemic, economic recession, and national racial reckoning make the threat of an extended, contested election outcome – and rocky transition – all the more consequential. 

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks show the potential consequences of a curtailed presidential transition. The 9/11 Commission report cites the fact that President George W. Bush’s team was still not fully in place when the attack came, less than eight months after he took office. He became president after the famously close election of 2000, and was declared the winner only in mid-December, after a Supreme Court ruling. 

“There was an awakening about the importance of the transition as a result of 9/11,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. 

President Bush became a top proponent of putting in place mechanisms to ensure a smooth transition, no matter how close or messy an election. He “ushered out his administration better than anyone had ever done before, because he understood what was at play here,” Mr. Stier says. 

Legislation passed in 2004 and 2010 helped smooth out presidential transitions, especially in the realm of security clearances. 

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/File

President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House Nov. 10, 2016. This month, President Trump has refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, setting up a rocky transition during the pandemic.

Why 2020 election is not like 2000

But Mr. Trump is not Mr. Bush. And 2020 is not 2000. Twenty years ago, the presidential election was microscopically close in one pivotal state, Florida, involving a recount and ultimately the intervention of the Supreme Court. This year, a few key states have posted close results so far, but nowhere near as close as Florida’s 537 votes in 2000. Barring an unforeseen development in audits and recounts expected in battleground states, Mr. Biden will assume the presidency in January. 

Team Biden is reportedly considering legal action to trigger the law that governs presidential transitions. Before the election, Politico reports, the Biden campaign foresaw problems ahead, and began hiring, vetting, and fundraising for a transition, which it’s legally allowed to do.

Trump administration officials are citing the delayed transition of 2000 as precedent. Then, the Democratic-appointed head of the General Services Administration – the agency that officially starts the transition – waited until Mr. Bush had won the election to sign the statement of ascertainment. The Presidential Transition Act of 1963 does not state exactly when the head of the GSA can or must ascertain an apparent winner. 

Clay Johnson, executive director of Mr. Bush’s presidential transition in 2000, says in an interview that cooperation between administrations can make a transition more pleasant but isn’t essential. 

“It’s nice to feel like you’re welcome and that you’re all – the incoming and outgoing – equally American,” Mr. Johnson says.

He adds that, while the delayed transition was inconvenient in 2000, it wasn’t a big impediment then and shouldn’t be today. Then, as now, they didn’t have access to government money, but raising money for a transition team is easy, he says. Donors have just spent big to get you into office, and they’re not going to miss an opportunity to help once the election appears to be won. 

“And if the reason for the extra effort is that there are lawsuits or people who authorized some recount, it’s important also to have great faith in the accuracy and legitimacy of the vote,” Mr. Johnson says. “It’s a small price to pay by everybody, to have us all be confident that the vote is the vote.”

The process of a presidential transition

Denis McDonough, former chief of staff for President Barack Obama, disagrees with Mr. Johnson’s assertion that delayed cooperation isn’t enormously important. 

There’s an etiquette to the process, says Mr. McDonough, who worked on the transition from Mr. Bush to Mr. Obama, then the transition to Mr. Trump.

“The first thing that you do is you try to make sure that you hit the statutory requirements,” says Mr. McDonough, now a public policy professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. 

Then, “you try to create a culture among your people that it’s part of their job responsibility to conduct a successful transition,” because democracy requires that peaceful transition of power, he says. 

Some presidential transition activities take place before the election. Under White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Trump administration established a White House Transition Coordinating Council, as required by law. And the Justice Department has been processing security clearances for key Biden officials, a move aimed at ensuring access to intelligence and protecting the nation from foreign adversaries.

At Notre Dame, Professor McDonough and a research team created a rubric to measure the progress of the transition process – essentially checking off the statutes that have been fulfilled so far. According to that measure, 73% of the requirements have so far been fulfilled. But the lack of “ascertainment,” for now, is an especially important missing element. 

Some presidential transitions are messy not because of the outgoing administration but because of internal factors. In November 2016, days after Mr. Trump was elected president, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was replaced by Vice President-elect Mike Pence as head of the Trump presidential transition. Binders full of detailed transition planning were thrown in the trash. 

“That caused a lot of grief for his administration; they were slow to get going,” says Mr. Stier of the Partnership for Public Service. “To this day, they don’t have all their people in place. It’s very hard to catch up if you fall behind.”

The U.S. government, after all, is a $5 trillion-plus enterprise, employing 4 million people, including the military, and 4,000 political appointments. 

“In order to do it right, you have to prepare – aggressively and early,” Mr. Stier says. “The Biden team got out of the box early. They’ve been doing a lot of good work, and now they really need the access to the agencies, they need their personnel processed, and they need the money.”

In the White House itself, the transition is especially stark. 

“The vast number of people in the White House are political appointees who on Jan. 20 at 11:59 a.m. will be working for Donald Trump, and then they will leave,” says John Fortier, director of government studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “Their offices will literally just be vacant and other people will show up.”

Vetting all these people is an arduous process, “which I think goes under the radar,” he says. 

Discussing his foreign-policy vision during his campaign, President-elect Joe Biden often mentioned his proposal to organize a summit of democracies during his first year in office.

Such a gathering of the world’s democratic leaders would signal both America’s return to its leadership role, Mr. Biden said, as well as an end to four years of a U.S. president cozying up to and even emulating some of the world’s despots and authoritarian regimes.

As Mr. Biden plans to take the reins of a house deeply divided politically and shaken by domestic crises, the idea of a summit offers a hint at why Mr. Biden is expected to act where he can, on his own and quickly.

Out of the blocks and despite congressional restraints, the president-elect wants to demonstrate not just that America is reclaiming its lead role on the world stage, but that his foreign policy will be something new – sharply different from his immediate predecessor’s, of course, but also a nuanced departure from Barack Obama’s.

Eager to underscore multilateralism and cooperation over unilateralism and the isolationist “America First,” Mr. Biden will immediately reverse a number of President Donald Trump’s withdrawals from international accords and organizations.

According to his own pronouncements and those of close foreign-policy advisers, he will move on Day 1 of his administration to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, reverse Mr. Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, and lift Mr. Trump’s ban on travelers from a number of mostly Muslim countries.

Moreover, Mr. Biden is likely to move quickly to name a Cabinet – he could unveil his choices as early as Thanksgiving, aides say – that tells both the American people and the world that he is serious about his pledge to use his appointments to showcase America’s diversity.

From allies, some wariness

Still, Mr. Biden’s theme that “America is back” is likely to go only so far – including with America’s closest allies, who learned over the last four years that, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, they can no longer rely on the U.S. for security.

While Europeans were clearly pleased with Mr. Biden’s election, they are also wary of any suggestion that transatlantic relations will simply revert to their glory days now that Mr. Trump will be out of the picture.

For one thing, they understand that America’s foreign policy – and specific aspects of it, like the constellation of alliances to which America has belonged – no longer benefit from broad bipartisan support, experts in U.S.-Europe affairs say. The spectacle of the U.S. presidential election and its aftermath are also reminders of the challenges even the world’s strongest democracies face.

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP/File

Former Defense Undersecretary for Policy Michele Flournoy, considered President-elect Joe Biden's likely choice as defense secretary, prepares to testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, March 13, 2019.

Moreover, U.S. and European interests have in some ways diverged in recent years. And even Mr. Biden’s idea of a summit of democracies to reaffirm Western values in the face of rising nationalism does not elicit unbridled enthusiasm from America’s closest European allies, some experts say.

What to do at such a summit about NATO ally Turkey, or other increasingly authoritarian democracies, from Poland and Hungary to the Philippines?

“Europe has changed its perspective on the U.S. overall, the era of European naiveté with the U.S. is over,” says Célia Belin, a visiting fellow at the Center for the United States and Europe at Brookings.

“Over the past four years and a little bit before, the interests [on the two sides of the Atlantic] have been diverging, and the bridge is a little bit longer to cross.”   

For some foreign-policy watchers, meanwhile, the idea of calling a global summit of democracies may yet retreat to a back burner as Mr. Biden finds that domestic concerns take top billing, while allies press for more pragmatic actions on climate change and trade disputes.

But that would be a shame, some foreign-policy experts and former officials in administrations of both political parties say, not just because a democracy summit would be a way to proclaim that America is back. More important, some say, it would signal that the United States is once again asserting the values that for seven decades made it the go-to leader and model on rights and other norms for much of the world.

With defense policy and national security concerns focusing more critically on China and Russia, a summit “is a useful way to signal a Biden administration’s commitment to democracy” and to “send a message about democratic norms and values,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in defense and foreign-policy issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In addition, a summit of democracies would signal America’s return to a cornerstone of its postwar geopolitical strategy, the construction and nurturing of mutually beneficial alliances to face a common foe – in this case rising nationalism and authoritarianism.

No rush on Iran deal

One international agreement Mr. Biden is not expected to rush to rejoin is the now five-nation Iran nuclear deal, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Mr. Trump pulled out of in 2018.

Mr. Biden hopes to return the U.S. to the JCPOA, advisers say, but not before a new round of negotiations with Tehran. The Biden aim would be to not only address the progress Iran has made in its nuclear program since the U.S. withdrew from the accord, but to also take up some of the issues not included in the original agreement. Mr. Biden would also insist on extending the JCPOA’s “sunset” dates.

But Senate Republicans – and some Senate Democrats – are likely to do what they can to block any U.S. return to the JCPOA. Indeed, some Iran experts say they expect the Trump administration to use its waning days to take steps that will make any Biden diplomatic overtures to Tehran extremely problematic.

Citing reports that the Trump administration is planning to add new sanctions on an already sanctions-smothered Iran on a weekly basis, Karim Sadjadpour, an expert in U.S.-Iran relations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says the sanctions are designed to make any Biden diplomacy with the Iranians more difficult.

He notes that the new sanctions are expected to focus on Iran’s missile program, domestic human rights abusers, and support for radical element in the region. “The significance will be that the optics won’t look so good for the Biden administration” if it moves to lift those sanctions in return for Iranian commitments, Mr. Sadjadpour says.

Carolyn Kaster/APFile

National Security Adviser Susan Rice, believed to be President-elect Joe Biden's top choice for secretary of state, looks on with President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden, at a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, April 5, 2016.

Yet despite Mr. Biden’s desire to return to diplomacy with Tehran, the Iran file is just one where the president-elect is expected to differentiate his foreign policy from the one he helped advance under Mr. Obama.

Another is China, and perhaps to a lesser degree, Russia.

Under Mr. Obama, diplomatic overtures to both Tehran and Beijing were made with the assumption that deals incorporating them into the international community – China into the World Trade Organization, for example, Iran into the JCPOA – would also over time act to alter their anti-liberal behavior both at home and in their neighborhoods.

But that did not work as envisaged in either case.

New view of diplomacy

Mr. Biden is said to see the world as having changed not just over the last four years of the Trump presidency, but since he entered the White House as Mr. Obama’s vice president in 2009. He now favors a narrower and more realist conception of diplomacy that serves U.S. national interests – for example, pursuing climate and arms control accords with China – without pie-in-the-sky expectations of eventual regime behavior modifications, according to Biden foreign-policy advisers and the president-elect’s own words.

Similarly, no one expects to see a push for a “reset” with Moscow from a Biden administration. Efforts to quickly relaunch foundering arms control diplomacy, yes – but no hopes that such negotiations and diplomatic reengagement might also lead to significantly wider cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Holding a summit of democracies, meanwhile, is something Mr. Biden could accomplish despite the strong political headwinds he is expected to face on the foreign-policy front at home.

And not just from what could be an uncooperative Republican Senate majority, but also a Democratic congressional caucus divided between moderate realists and progressives who hold differing views of how the U.S. should interact overseas.

Formation of the Cabinet is one of the first and most significant ways of setting the tone of a presidency. For secretary of state, Mr. Biden is said to have former Obama national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice at the top of his list. And he’s expected to name former undersecretary of defense Michèle Flournoy as Pentagon chief – making her the first woman in that role, breaking another of America’s most durable glass ceilings.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/File

Vice President of the United States Joe Biden (left) shakes hands with Vladimir Putin, then Russia's prime minister, in Moscow, March 10, 2011. Russia is likely to try to negotiate an extension to the New START strategic arms reduction deal with a Biden White House.

Left exhausted, disappointed, and confused by four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, much of the world breathed a sigh of relief on the news that Joe Biden had won the U.S. election.

But simply “not being Trump” will not be good enough for very long on the international stage. Governments and their citizens are already voicing their hopes and expectations of the next U.S. leader. Soon they will be lining up to press their case. What do they want?

The East looks to ease tensions

Mr. Trump has perhaps taken no foreign country on such a wild roller-coaster ride as China. Now Beijing is hoping for eased tensions; a renewal of regular consultations with Washington; and what Jin Canrong, a prominent Chinese commentator, calls a “moderate and mature approach.”

Beijing is hopeful that Mr. Biden will lift some of the trade tariffs that his predecessor slapped on over $360 billion worth of Chinese exports. He may well do so, since he has called Mr. Trump’s trade war “damaging and erratic.”

China would also like Mr. Biden to lift restrictions on Chinese tech enterprises such as TikTok and WeChat, abandoning the current administration’s policy of technological decoupling. But Beijing is likely to be disappointed if it hopes Mr. Biden will greenlight Huawei’s 5G telecom technology, seen as a national security threat.

More broadly, Chinese leaders would like to resume practical cooperation with Washington on global issues such as COVID-19 and climate change. But the extent of that will depend on the two sides’ ability to “rebuild mutual strategic trust,” said Xin Qiang, deputy head of the Center for U.S. Studies at Fudan University, to the Communist Party-run Global Times.

That’s something that Moscow would like too, but few there expect it.

“Biden has said that Russia is an adversary, while China is a competitor,” says Anatoly Tsiganok, head of the independent Center for Military Forecasts. “That makes it clear we are going to be enemy No. 1.”

That does not stop Russia from hoping for the sort of agreements that enemies make – specifically an extension to the New START strategic arms reduction deal, which Mr. Trump had said Washington would leave when it expires next February.

The last remaining arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, the treaty can be rolled over for five years if both sides agree. Mr. Biden has written that he would pursue such an extension of the deal, which he described in a Foreign Affairs article last June as “an anchor of strategic stability.”

“That will be very welcome in Moscow,” says Vladimir Dvorkin, an expert at the government-linked Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

More family planning in Africa

On the continent of Africa, which President Trump once insulted with a scatological obscenity, people are hoping for at least a little more respect. And women’s rights groups are hoping for something much more concrete – an end to the “global gag rule.”

Carlo Allegri/Reuters/File

U.S. first lady Melania Trump and Kenyan first lady Margaret Kenyatta play with children at the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi, Kenya, Oct. 5, 2018. Women’s rights groups in Africa are hoping that President-elect Joe Biden will bring an end to the “global gag rule.”

That is what opponents call the policy that prevents the U.S. government from funding nongovernmental groups that help women to have abortions that are legal in their countries. The policy has been used as a partisan light switch: Republican presidents turn it on, Democratic presidents turn it off. Mr. Biden has promised to reverse the policy that Mr. Trump adopted in 2017.

“Joe Biden’s victory is an historic one for global, accessible, and affordable health care,” said Melvine Ouyo, a Kenyan women’s health activist, in a statement. “The last four years were full of struggle, pain, and loss of lives for lack of access to reproductive resources and affordable health care.”

“We’ve all been worn down by the criticism of our work and the funding issues,” adds Carole Sekimpi, Uganda director of Marie Stopes International, one of the world’s major family planning charities. “We’re looking forward to having fewer distractions.”

Mr. Biden has also pledged to fulfill another broadly held hope by ending Mr. Trump’s immigration ban on people from 13 countries with large Muslim populations. Five of those countries are in Africa, home to 25% of the continent’s inhabitants.

An upheaval of expectations in the Mideast

Almost all citizens of Iran are subject to that ban, but its repeal is by no means top of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s agenda.

Rather, what he wants most of all is to see the United States return to the landmark 2015 nuclear deal that Iran signed with Washington and six other parties. President Trump pulled the U.S. out of that agreement in 2018 and imposed a draconian “maximum pressure” regime of economic and other sanctions on Iran.

Mr. Biden was vice president in the administration that negotiated the 2015 agreement, and he has indicated a readiness to rejoin it if Iran goes back to respecting the deal’s limits on its nuclear program.

Hard-line Iranian opponents of the agreement, though, determined to deny President Rouhani any benefit, have been arguing that Iran should expect nothing from Mr. Biden, portraying him as a longtime ally of Israel’s.

In neighboring Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani would like President-elect Biden to listen to him more carefully. Washington largely ignored the Kabul government as it negotiated its February peace deal with the Taliban. That deal traded a full withdrawal of Western troops in return for a Taliban promise to prevent Al Qaeda and Islamic State from planning attacks abroad from Afghan territory. It also required President Ghani to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. But that has not stopped the Taliban from continuing to kill Afghan soldiers and civilians.

In the Middle East, it is Saudi Arabia that has had to downgrade its expectations of Washington most dramatically in the wake of Mr. Biden’s election victory. Where President Trump shielded the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, from criticism, Mr. Biden has threatened to treat the country as a “pariah” for its human rights violations.

Going into a defensive crouch, Riyadh is distilling its hopes down to a single modest goal – security – say people close to the Saudi government’s decision-making process. The Saudis hope to persuade Mr. Biden to maintain the U.S. security umbrella in the Gulf, protecting the oil-rich sheikhdoms there from Iranian attack. They also hope to convince the incoming U.S. president to ensure that the Iran nuclear deal respects Gulf security concerns.

Elsewhere in the region there are hopes of a more active U.S. diplomatic role. Jordan’s King Abdullah, who has long mediated conflicts in the Arab world, would welcome such a development: He has found his own role less potent without an active U.S. administration.

And while Iraqi President Mustafa al-Kadhimi is hoping Mr. Biden will revive Washington’s role in anti-terrorism efforts as his government vies with sectarian militias for control of the state, the Palestinians hope that the next U.S. president will be less one-sidedly supportive of Israel than his predecessor.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, cannot hope that Mr. Biden will offer the same wholehearted personal support that he enjoyed from Mr. Trump. But Israel can likely count on the president-elect’s long record of support for the Jewish state.

Aid and anti-corruption in Latin America

Closer to home, south of the border, Latin America’s leaders are expecting closer attention from Mr. Biden, who made over a dozen visits to their region when he was vice president. And that, they hope, will bring stronger relations and fresh aid.

In Central America, Mr. Trump has used development aid as a tool to negotiate with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, wielding it so as to convince them to serve as “safe third countries” for asylum-seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexican border.

Charlie Riedel/AP/File

Members of a U.S.-bound migrant caravan stand on a road outside the town of Arriaga, Mexico, Oct. 27, 2018. Economic conditions and crime in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala serve as primary drivers of migration to the United States. Those countries hope that under President-elect Joe Biden, the U.S. will supply more aid to address such underlying problems.

“Central American governments will be looking for an end to those agreements” when Mr. Biden takes office, says Elizabeth Oglesby, an expert on Central America at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Governments will want more of a commitment to economic aid but in a more stable way.”

Many citizens and human rights defenders, meanwhile, hope to see renewed U.S. attention to fighting corruption and impunity. This was not a priority for Mr. Trump, who said nothing when the Guatemalan government dismantled an anti-corruption body that served as an international model.

“In Guatemala, judges, prosecutors, and attorneys are hoping for more technical and political support” from a Biden administration to combat impunity and corruption, says Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s former attorney general who has dedicated her career to strengthening Guatemala’s judicial system. “The politics of the U.S. have big, direct impacts on our countries. ... I’m hopeful President-elect Biden will help win back the progress we lost” under Mr. Trump.

Hands off in Europe

European leaders are not expecting Mr. Biden to play an especially active role in their region, says Susi Dennison, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The bandwidth for dealing with the European agenda might be slimmer than some may like,” she predicts. “Part of that is a strong expectation that Europe is in charge of its own neighborhood.” And on top of that, Mr. Biden is expected to devote more of his attention to Asia, in line with his old boss’s pivot to that region of the world.

There could be choppy transatlantic waters ahead, cautions Patrick Diamond, head of policy for former British Prime Minister David Cameron. He sees “a push for a digital tax on big tech” firms such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook in Europe but suspects that “President-elect Biden may be as reluctant to impose [them] as President Trump.”

On the other hand, Mr. Biden’s commitment to multilateralism is reassuring to Europeans, who live by that creed. They can be confident that the next U.S. president values NATO, and they are delighted that he has pledged to rejoin the Paris accord on climate change and keep the U.S. in the World Health Organization.

That matters, especially in smaller European countries suffering badly from COVID-19, says Ms. Dennison. “Their health and economic recovery will be tied to any policy that requires international cooperation.”

Ann Scott Tyson in Seattle; Fred Weir in Moscow; Ryan Lenora Brown in Johannesburg; Taylor Luck in Amman, Jordan; Scott Peterson and Shafi Musaddique in London; and Whitney Eulich in Mexico City contributed reporting to this article.

Scott Sonner/AP

A man leaves the polling place at Reed High School in Sparks, Nevada, on Nov. 3, 2020. In many battleground states, Democrat Joe Biden won by a narrower margin than polls had predicted. High turnout may be one factor that pollsters had trouble grappling with.

A majority of opinion polls showed Democrat Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by a wide margin in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. But President-elect Biden’s winning margins in battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan proved to be much narrower than the polls predicted.

Similarly, many Democrats in congressional races underperformed their polls. No “blue wave” materialized for Democrats to retake a majority in the U.S. Senate.   

Critics say the polling industry has failed to learn after its misses in the 2016 presidential election. 

How wrong were the polls in predicting the 2020 election results? 

In terms of the popular vote, not as much as you might think. The final RealClearPolitics average of polls had former Vice President Biden ahead by 7.2 percentage points. Similarly, FiveThirtyEight projected a margin of victory for Mr. Biden of 8.4 points. 

As ballots are still being counted, including provisional and mail-in ballots in non-battleground states, the final tally is likely to change. Mr. Biden is currently ahead by 3 percentage points, but analysts say that could climb toward 5 points, given where the outstanding ballots are. The average polling error for presidential elections since 1968 was 3 points, according to FiveThirtyEight. So pollsters could end up within – or not far from – normal margins of error on the overall popular vote.

Where the polls erred more was in battleground states that both candidates needed to win. The final RealClearPolitics average for Wisconsin predicted a 7-point win for Mr. Biden, with smaller margins in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Most polls also had shown little change during the campaign, suggesting that Mr. Biden’s advantage was stable. In the end, his victories in these three crucial states were thin; Wisconsin was won by 20,540 votes. 

Some pollsters did better in predicting state-level votes. Suffolk University Political Research Center was within 2 points of final results in Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, although it also overestimated Mr. Biden’s margin in Pennsylvania. 

Even more erratic was the polling for closely watched congressional races like the Senate seat defended by Republican Susan Collins in Maine. Pre-election polls put her opponent, Sara Gideon, in a strong lead; Senator Collins won by 9 points. In South Carolina, incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham beat his Democratic challenger by 10 points, defying polls showing a dead heat. 

Analysts say ticket-splitting may have been an under-appreciated factor in states like Maine, where Mr. Biden ran far ahead of Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in 2016 but failed to lift Ms. Gideon. Intensifying partisanship tends to boost straight-party tickets. 

What all these polling inaccuracies have in common is a direction of travel: support for Democratic candidates was often wildly overestimated. 

What is behind these misses in election polling? 

Accurate polling rests on two critical calculations: The makeup of the electorate and which eligible voters are most likely to cast ballots. These calculations allow polling agencies to weigh the responses to surveys and project the outcome of an actual election. 

In 2016, most state polls failed to predict Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory, in part because their surveys didn’t include enough non-college-educated voters and underestimated the turnout in rural areas. In the aftermath, surveys were adjusted to account for these demographics. 

Experts caution that it’s too early to pinpoint what went wrong in 2020 since not all ballots have been counted. But it appears that pollsters may have been thrown off by high turnout – the highest in at least 50 years – and the popularity of mail-in and early voting during a pandemic. In Texas, which expanded early in-person voting, turnout by eligible voters rose 9 points. 

Early voting meant that pre-election surveys could identify more actual voters as opposed to likely voters. This may have led to a pro-Biden bias in their sample, since fewer Republicans voted in advance amid Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about fraud in mailed ballots. 

Michael Traugott, a research professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, compares it to a cake recipe in which the ingredients are listed correctly but their proportion is unknown. “The portion of the recipe that was early voting was too large,” he says. 

Unlike in 2016, surveys found few undecided or third-party voters. That year, a significant number of late-breaking voters in battleground states went to Mr. Trump. But that doesn’t appear to be a factor in 2020 that could explain the underestimation of his support.  

Conservatives argue that pollsters miss Mr. Trump’s support because respondents are reluctant to state their preference, knowing that it may be socially unacceptable, particularly in professional circles. Studies have failed to replicate the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis. A bigger factor may be that Trump supporters are less likely to participate in surveys because they don’t trust pollsters. 

Has it become harder to survey public opinion on voting intentions? 

Caller ID and call blocking has made it harder to conduct live surveys. Some polling agencies rely more on robocalls; others have turned to online surveys that may not be as reliable. This drives up the cost of polling and may have contributed to polling errors in 2020, though it was already a factor in 2018 when more of the midterm polling was accurate. 

However, this year the pandemic led to higher response rates since more voters were at home, says David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “We were finishing projects a day earlier than scheduled,” he says. Voters seemed happy to talk to a pollster, perhaps because they were tired of talking politics with others in their household. 

But as noted, the propensity of voters to respond to polls isn’t equally distributed. The bias in surveys may reflect Democrats being overrepresented, as Trump voters with lower levels of social trust are harder to poll.

Jennifer Murphy/Memorial University of Newfoundland

Researchers at Memorial University in the Canadian province of Newfoundland transformed dried and ground mussel shells (left) into a soft calcite material (right).

When she first saw it, Francesca Kerton thought someone must be playing a prank.

The white blobs didn’t belong there, thought Dr. Kerton, a chemistry professor at Memorial University in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. They were soft and pliable, and they had emerged from mussel shells made of calcium carbonate, which is famously hard and brittle. 

But, sure enough, when they repeated the experiment, that spongy stuff appeared again.

Being scientists, they poked and prodded the baffling blobs. They ripped the material apart like cotton candy, stuck it back together, stretched it, and squeezed it so that water seeped out like it would from a soggy sponge. 

“We did have a lot of fun in the lab acting like kids, because we hadn’t come across anything like this before, trying to figure out what it was and what we could do with it,” Dr. Kerton says. 

It turns out the mystery material was still made up of calcium carbonate. And, given its spongy properties, this substance might just prove useful for ocean cleanups or biomedical purposes. The researchers reported their discovery in a paper published Thursday in the journal Matter. 

This study is an example of the importance of curiosity-driven science in developing our knowledge about the world around us, says Peter Fratzl, director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, who was not involved in the new paper. 

“It’s curiosity that wants us to understand why and how it works, but then knowing why and how it works, you can put it to use in other contexts. And, of course, you never know before you do the study what is going to be useful,” he says. “Serendipity in science is a very well-known effect.”

Blob and weave

The experiment began with a proposition from representatives from the local aquaculture industry. They’d noted that the industry was producing more mussels and processing many for export, leaving behind piles of shells as a waste product. Could Dr. Kerton turn those mussel shells into something useful, they asked.

She brought the question to her lab and they began toying with concepts. “Because we’re in Canada,” Dr. Kerton says, “our idea was to make a new de-icer” for roads. They started with a basic experiment: grinding up the shells and mixing them with acetic acid, the chemical found in vinegar. 

Jennifer Murphy/Memorial University of Newfoundland

When the researchers mixed ground mussel shells with acetic acid, a soft calcite material floated to the surface of the solution.

That’s when the baffling blobs appeared.

Calcium carbonate – the main component of mussel shells, pearls, and the shells of many other marine organisms – is highly reactive with acid, so the shells should have dissolved completely. So how exactly did the hard shells become soft and squishy sponges? Was there something specific to acetic acid that made the reaction yield spongy stuff?

Questions still remain, but it might have something to do with a sort of protein glue that was in the shells before they entered the acetic acid solution. Dr. Kerton explains that calcium carbonate crystals are tightly packed in the shells like a brick wall, held together by organic material. And the reaction with acetic acid, she says, likely loosened that glue enough for the crystals to rearrange into a softer overall material. How much protein glue is needed to produce the spongy stuff remains a question, Dr. Kerton says.

The spongy substance is not exactly a new form of calcium carbonate, says Fiona Meldrum, a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Leeds who was not part of the new study. Instead, she says, the added organic material makes it a composite.

Still, she says, “It’s an interesting material, and it would be fascinating to look into this further, and find out why it was produced and why it has the properties that it does.”

Mussel bound

Dr. Kerton and her team largely focused on what this spongy material might be used for – probably not the de-icer they’d been aiming for. 

Due to the high surface area on the “mussel sponge,” as Dr. Kerton calls it, the team’s first thought was that it might be able to absorb pollutants. Sure enough, when they stuck a bit of the sponge in seawater with oil in it, the oil would stick to the sponge and the researchers could pull it out, clean it off, and stick the sponge back in the water to keep the cleaning process going. They also tried absorbing colored dye out of water. Indeed, “the mussel sponge became colored and the solution became colorless,” she says. 

It’s yet unclear whether production of this material could be scaled up enough to make a difference in the vast oceans of the world, for example, but it’s an intriguing proposition, Dr. Fratzl says. Currently, cleaning oil out of water is a difficult and expensive process. An absorbent material made from mussel shells would be quite a bit cheaper, he says, and it would be a way to use aquacultural waste.

Although Dr. Kerton is driven to find useful applications in her work, she also says it’s important for scientists to maintain a sense of simple wonder – and fun – about their research. 

“All scientists, I think, they’re really just like big children. They just don’t stop asking questions. A lot of parents get annoyed with their children for asking ‘why,’” she says. “Scientists haven’t lost that sense of curiosity.”

As other aspects of a researcher’s career become more of a focus, scientists can get a bit serious, Dr. Kerton says. “It takes these unexpected things to get your mojo going again, getting your joy and curiosity.”

AP

Russian peacekeepers board a military plane heading to Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday as part of a settlement ending the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Did Russia just do an about-face and embrace a core principle of the international order?

On Monday, it brokered a settlement to stop one former Soviet state, Azerbaijan, from forcibly taking more land claimed by another former Soviet state, Armenia, in a brutal war that began Sept. 27. Moscow even sent troops into the disputed area, known as Nagorno-Karabakh, to help keep the truce.

What makes the settlement interesting is that Russia, a country that used force twice in the past 12 years to change the borders of neighboring states, stood up to Azerbaijan’s aggression. This could be a moment to celebrate Moscow’s apparent respect for the sovereign equality of other countries even as it had practical reasons to intervene.

Among most member states of the United Nations, the prohibition against the use of force to change borders lies at the heart of the U.N. charter. Indeed that global norm accounts for the relative peace of the past seven decades compared with the destructive world wars of the early 20th century. In 2008, Russia violated the prohibition by taking Georgia’s Abkhazia and Tskhinvali regions. In 2014, it used force again to take over parts of Ukraine.

These actions under President Vladimir Putin have since hit Russia’s economy. The West has imposed sanctions and kept Mr. Putin at a diplomatic distance. The U.N. General Assembly criticized Russia for its belligerency against Ukraine. And Mr. Putin now faces domestic pressure to deal with COVID-19.

Azerbaijan, which has used its oil wealth to buy new weapons, attacked Armenian forces in September with Turkish support. Armenia, which is aligned with Russia, has since suffered heavy losses on the battlefield. Russia is also at odds with Turkey in a number of conflicts, such as in Libya and Syria. All of this may have led Moscow to find a way to end the use of brutal force by Azerbaijan in changing the current boundaries with Armenia.

Russia’s many reasons for peace along its borders may have awakened it to the global imperative for the inviolability of national borders. “Moscow has come to be regarded as aggressively imposing itself on the world,” writes Putin-watcher Anna Arutunyan in The Moscow Times.

Now, in ending another country’s aggression through diplomacy, it has projected the force of peace instead of the force of war.  It may have decided that the world’s most important norm is worthwhile.