Are the exit polls, on which just about every elections analyst has relied, wrong? That’s a question raised by New York Times Upshot writer Nate Cohn — a question whose answers have serious implications for how you look at the 2016 general election.

Standard analysis is that Democrats have a built-in advantage because the electorate is increasingly non-white. The exit polls say the white percentage of the electorate declined from 77 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2008 and 72 percent in 2012. In that year, they said, 13 percent of voters were black, 10 percent Hispanics, 3 percent Asian.