Watching early vote exit polls is kind of a tough game to play prognosticator on, but it begins to give us a sense of what the polls mean, because the info is a lot more concrete than polls. Basically, polls have a segment of responses that are undecided, meanwhile exit polls don’t. The idea as I understand it is that you can contrast exit polls with polls in order to discern what that undecided vote really seems to be breaking for.

In 2016, that undecided segment broke hard for Trump. It hasn’t in any election since.

Here’s what exit polls so far say about Trump (vs 2020) and Harris (vs Biden & Obama):

• Trump’s support isn’t showing any major improvements on exit polls at this time except with non-college educated white folks, specifically ages 50-64. His support in that same demographic actually has lessened in a bunch of other age groups, with a small boost in 18-39. This is, however, only with men.
• Harris has met or beat both Biden and Obama 2012 numbers in most every demographic, with the exception of hispanic women / younger age groups, which have gone down a little bit. Most notably her support with white folks is strong, and her support with white women is at historic levels. She’s overperforming dramatically with independents.

Obviously, again, exit polls are subject to swings and changes over time and so it’s all contingent on this continuing, but right now the early votes exit polls are at severe contrast with the aggregators. Like, embarrassingly severe.

One remaining thing from the exit polls worth mentioning - the last minute surge of support for Trump in 2020 was largely because the Republican leadership was stalwart in telling everyone to vote only on election day. That isn’t happening this year, though, which means that Republicans aren’t going to be able to expect the same kind of last-minute surge this year. Meanwhile, the opposite seems true for Harris: a lot of early votes for Harris are first time voters or infrequent voters, and not from the pool of 2020 early voters.

So, at this point the early vote is around 40m, or 25% of total votes in 2020. In order to get back to the “surprising Trump upswell” that we’re all worried about, this trend would have to not only stop, but AGGRESSIVELY reverse course. Either that or all the exit polls are horribly wrong.