I will let you in on a little trick I use. If you say there is an 80% chance that one candidate will win, and he loses, you can just shrug and say the other 20% happened, and you were still right. You do not even need to assign numbers. You can say a candidate will probably win, and still be right if he loses.
On top of that, lower expectations, especially if higher expectations are not warranted. Republicans were predicting winning a hundred new seats in the House, and now anything less than that looks like a defeat. If they had said that they will lose the popular vote, but probably win a wafer thin majority of the House, that was very possible.
We have to ask, if Americans all agree with the alt right, why can't Republicans get a majority of the popular vote. I know it does not matter to who wins, but it still does call into question the alt rights claims about America. If Americans were starving in great numbers, a majority of them would not be voting for Democrats.