Presidency in the balance early today as count continues
WASHINGTON — A deeply divided America counted votes on Tuesday in the bitter presidential race, as Hillary Clinton racked up large majorities in the nation’s diverse urban regions, while Donald Trump exceeded previous Republican margins in rural, whiter parts of the country.
As polls closed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, state after state, from North Carolina to New Hampshire and west to Michigan were too close to call for hours, defying predictions by most polls and strategists in both parties that Clinton would win an early victory.
By late in the evening, the result appeared likely to turn on two states of the upper Midwest, Michigan and Wisconsin, with Clinton probably needing to win both of them.
With Republicans also beating the odds in close Senate races, the party stood on the verge of having a united government. Clinton, by contrast, would probably face a unified Republican Congress if she succeeded in eking out a presidential victory.
Amid unusually high turnout in several keenly contested states, Clinton received strong support from minority voters, especially Latinos, and did much better among college-educated white voters than any previous Democratic nominee.
Trump, however, countered by piling up huge majorities among the non-college-educated, blue-collar whites that have long been the mainstay of his support.
The result was a series of tight races in battleground states as the red swaths of the nation’s political map became much redder, even as many of the blue areas became bluer.
Clinton won Virginia and Colorado, according to exit polls and nearly compete returns. Both were swing states in which her campaign had long expressed confidence. But Trump countered with apparent victories in Ohio and Florida, where his Election Day turnout wiped out a big Clinton early-vote lead.
As financial markets absorbed the possibility that Trump might win the presidency, futures dropped, as did the Mexican peso. Markets had risen significantly in recent days as most polls showed Clinton’s position strengthening.
The voting came at the close of a tumultuous campaign in which Clinton sought not only to become the first woman elected president but also to win a third term for her party in the White House — a difficult task last accomplished by George H.W. Bush more than a generation ago.
The campaign repeatedly upset expectations: Clinton, despite her quest to break a glass ceiling that has persisted throughout American history, was cast as the candidate of the status quo. Trump, despite his vast wealth and political connections, successfully took the role of outsider, expressing the grievances and anger of much of the nation’s white working class.
After a campaign as divisive as any in modern American history, dawn broke Tuesday to the sight of long lines of voters waiting patiently outside polling places, as if those people long ignored as the candidates squabbled had stepped in to protect the nation’s tradition of peaceful transitions.
Nationally, there were few reported difficulties beyond the usual snafus in a smattering of districts.
The generally smooth Election Day provided a counterpoint to a campaign that repeatedly brought to the surface deep division along lines of race, gender and class.
Time and again, the campaign swayed under the weight of the candidates’ weaknesses, with much of the worst damage to both being self-inflicted.
For Clinton, the most prominent drama centered on her use of a private email server to handle sensitive information during her tenure as secretary of State. The issue dogged her from the campaign’s opening days until its end, erupting once again less than two weeks before the election when FBI Director James B. Comey announced his agents were looking at a fresh batch of emails to ascertain their relevance.
Comey’s move stunned and angered Democrats. Then, in a final twist, he announced on Sunday that the FBI had completed its work and found that most of the newly discovered messages were duplicates of ones already reviewed.
For Trump, the problems centered on scores of insults directed at women, Latinos, blacks, Muslims and the disabled.
The final stages of his campaign were convulsed by the release last month of a 2005 video in which he bragged of being able to get away with kissing women against their will and grabbing their genitals. Within days, a dozen women had accused Trump of unwanted advances. He denied all the accusations.
Despite their idiosyncrasies, the campaign was a classic insider-outsider clash.
Trump, the Manhattan real estate heir and billionaire, rode populist rage that reflected discomfort with the nation’s changing demographics and discontent about the disappearance of jobs that once had helped lift them into the middle class.
He was the outsider braying at the nation’s establishment, in every sphere, accusing those in charge of colluding in corruption even as he bragged that he was once a willing participant in the system that he decried.
Clinton represented an ample target for his attacks. She came to national note as the wife of the Arkansas governor who upended politics in 1992 by defeating President Bush.
After Bill Clinton’s tumultuous, impeachment-marked presidency — in which Hillary Clinton delved into policy by way of an unsuccessful healthcare program — she won a U.S. Senate seat in New York that proved to be a stepping stone to her unsuccessful 2008 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
She served as secretary of State to the man who defeated her, a move that rebounded in her favor this year as the popular president campaigned in battleground states for her.
Her decades-long presence on the political stage helped her seize the nomination, but in the general election, she ran up against the inevitable desire of voters to change the party in the White House after two successive terms.