 "US chooses its President today")
Election Day is here at last. America is set to decide between Hillary Clinton and Donald J Trump.
But the long, unusual and often ugly 2016 presidential campaign has been about the country's changing demographics and the shifting coalitions of the two major parties as much as about the two main candidates.
In an early-morning interview, Trump said he would do "very well" in the crucial battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, and acknowledged that after nearly a year and a half of campaigning the only thing left for him to do was wait and see.
"We're going to win a lot of states," Trump said on Fox News. "Who knows what happens ultimately?"
His voice raspy from one last after-midnight rally, Trump took some digs at Clinton for enlisting celebrities to bolster her crowds and he assailed the news media for trying to keep him down. A self-proclaimed lover of polls, Trump said he no longer believes most of them. "I do think a lot of the polls are purposely wrong," he said. "I don't even think they interview people, I think they just put out phony numbers."
But there is one vote that the Republican nominee knew he could count on this Election Day. "I've decided to vote for Trump," Trump said.
Parents held their children in the air to get a glimpse as Clinton voted for herself in Chappaqua, NY, on Tuesday morning. "It's a humbling feeling," Clinton said.
Trump appeared to be in good spirits when he arrived at a Manhattan polling place on the Upper East Side just before 11 am with his wife, Melania, to vote for himself. He was met with a mix of cheers and boos as he left his motorcade and waved to pedestrians.
Inside Public School 59, Trump shook hands with other voters and offered high-fives to some children who came along with their parents.
The vice-presidential candidates also voted in the morning.
In a display of Election Day punctuality, Clinton's running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, and his wife, Anne Holton, arrived at their polling place in Richmond before Virginia's polls had opened. They cast their ballots just after 6 am. "We feel good," Kaine told reporters afterward. "It's kind of like we've done all we can do and now it's in the hands of the voters. But we feel really comfortable about it."
Governor Mike Pence did not have far to go to cast his ballot. Flanked by his wife, Karen, and his daughter, Charlotte, Pence walked across the street from Indiana's governor's mansion to St. Thomas Aquinas Church shortly before noon. Pence told reporters and supporters on hand that he was "humbled" to be able to choose himself and Trump.
Early voters, urban voters and minority voters are all more likely to wait and wait. And that makes them less likely to vote in the future, according to new research. Minority voters are six times as likely as whites to wait longer than an hour to vote. Those disparities persist even within the same town or county, suggesting they don't reflect simply the greater difficulty of putting on elections in populous cities.
The changing nature of the presidential map can be deduced from where Clinton went on Monday. She was assured enough of her prospects for winning Florida, a state that George W Bush won twice, to not return to the biggest battleground of them all, but she held her second event in four days in Michigan, a state no Republican has won since 1988.
Clinton's aides express confidence that the results will go their way, in large part because of their optimism about Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia, but they are less bullish about their prospects in Michigan and states like Iowa and Ohio. It is a striking turnabout given how rooted Democrats once were in the heavily unionized Midwest and how much they struggled in the South and parts of the West.
But they have effectively swapped much of their working-class white base for the so-called rising demographic of millennials, non-white voters and suburbanites clustered near cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington.
From watching these communities, it will become clear on Tuesday why Clinton's party enjoys a structural advantage in the Electoral College. But this election may also hasten the day when more of the heartland becomes out of reach, illustrating what Democrats lost as much as what they gained.
©The New York Times News service
