This is based on exit polls.

Exit polls only interview people who vote in person, which may be generally be useful, but in this election are an enormously systematically biased slice of the electorate.

You really can't base any generalizations beyond the in-person voting segment based on them.

At least with the NYT exit polls, they included phone interviews to account for mail in voters. Here is a more systematic post-election analysis, based on a huge survey (100,000+ respondents), from Fox/Associated Press/U Chicago: https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results/voter...

This one shows significantly lower Black vote for Trump than the Essence article (12% of men, 6% of women) but an even higher Latino vote (39% of men, 32% of women). Both sets of data show Trump losing support from white men slightly. (Which is consistent with pre-election polling.)

> This is based on exit polls.

Are there some other measurements based on something else, or is it something we now can never know as a result of mail in ballots having no polling and an expected different statistical distribution?

Exits aren't great in the best circumstances, but early unweighted exits are widely believed to be almost completely useless.

I suggest looking at states like Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, etc. that only do mail in voting and see how they measure what used to be measured by exit polls.

> Are there some other measurements based on something else

For 2016 and 2018, Pew had validated voter datasets, based on people in their American Trends Panel who were matched against voter databases and thus known to have voted. Assuming they do the same thing (or some other reputable firm does something similar, or ideally both) for 2020, that would probably be the best data source.

The votes haven't even been fully counted (NY has barely started with their mail-ins), so the exits aren't weighted yet. There are, so far as I know, no valid takes to be made from current exit data.

I posted this elsewhere in the thread but even without exit polls we can make some reasonably solid conclusions from geographical voting data: https://sweep.thedispatch.com/p/the-sweep-dont-trust-the-exi...

At this point it seems pretty clear that Trump made big gains among Latinos compared to 2016; with other demographics the jury is still out (I think.)

You don't need exits to know that; there were sharp swings towards Trump in majority-Latino south Texas counties.

Um... that's exactly what the post you're replying to says?

It's what the exit polls say, although the main lesson we've learned this year is not to trust polls.

What's clearer is that Trump made big gains in areas of the country with a high Latino and Hispanic population - e.g. Santa Ana county, CA, which is 77% Hispanic, saw a 13-point swing to Trump, and there are many similar datapoints from across the country. It's pretty clear Trump carried Florida on the strength of the Latino vote in that state. There's also similar evidence that Trump made big gains this year among Asians.

https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1326190869163225090

https://sweep.thedispatch.com/p/the-sweep-dont-trust-the-exi...

So to summarise: Trump definitely made gains among Hispanics and probably made gains among Asians according to voting data; he made gains with every demographic except white men according to exit polls; the former data is more reliable than the latter.

Preelection polling was also showing Trump gains among Asians: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-asian-americans-are...