I think I've stated this over and over again in various contexts but much of the news you see reads like disinformation. What's interesting is how if you actually look at polling data how respondents have classified what I sometime hear described as "white supremacist dog-whistles" / what is described in the following article as a message of "racial fear". To quote How Democrats can talk about race and win from earlier this year:
Unsurprisingly, 72 percent of Republicans found this message convincing [rated it 51 or higher out of 100]. But we found that 52 percent of Democrats found this message convincing as well.
Roge Karma
The proportion of Democrats who found that narrative compelling is interesting in its own right. But what I found even more shocking was how people of color responded to the racial fear message.
Ian Haney López
Yes. Sixty percent of Latinos and 54 percent of African Americans found it convincing, which isn’t much lower than the 61 percent of whites who did.
If your message of "racial fear" is one that minorities - including African Americans - support at a similar rate as white Americans, the description of as such seems misleading, perhaps intentionally so. What you seem to be seeing is nativism rather than racism yet it's the latter branding that gets most attention. I'm not a fan of nativism but it's not quite the same thing as racism.
Related, it's also interesting how a follow-on New York Times article on the aftermath of city council in one major US city deciding to "defund the police":
But what seemed like a rising progressive tide distorted a more complicated picture, argued Dave Bicking, board member of Communities United Against Police Brutality, a grass-roots group in Minneapolis that was founded in 2000. He said that groups like Black Visions Collective and its partner organization, Reclaim the Block, had the ear of the new City Council, but that those in power seemed to treat the activists as stand-ins for all Black, progressive or younger residents, glossing over the diversity of those electorates.
“You can’t lump everybody together,” said Mr. Bicking, who is 69 years old and white but represents a wide-ranging community group. “The City Council would say: ‘Oh, we went out and talked to a lot of people. We listened to a lot of people.’ And, well, it was people from those two groups only. They weren’t listening to anybody else.”
One later section also seems of particular relevance:
As the commission weighed its options, evidence mounted that the public wanted police reform, but did not support the actions of councilors or share the aims of influential activists. A poll from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune found that a plurality of residents, including 50 percent of Black people, opposed reducing the size of the police department.
i.e. not only were the city council's actions to "defund the police" unpopular amongst the population as a whole, they were even more unpopular amongst African-Americans. i.e. in the name of listening to that demographic the council undertook actions that the group in question actually appears disproportionately opposed to.
I'm still not sure what the results of US election are going to be. I suspect (though am not sure) that exit polls probably solely or disproportionately account for in-person rather than mail-in votes, which I'd expect to consist disproportionately of Trump-voters. Guess we'll wait and see.
EDIT: Sort reconsidering how much, if exit polls only cover in-person voting, how well the exact voter trends will sort themselves out in the end. That said, think the general position of the-media-representation-of-the-interests-of-particular-demographics-is-often-highly-and-predictably-inaccurate holds up OK regardless. I didn't even talk about any of the large swings in certain areas among Hispanic (not Latinx!) voters, such as:
EDIT (again): Looks like the exit polling didn't just tackle outside of polling places per one NYT columnist who's very annoyed at the sorts of results noted above:
