Donald Trump Wins the Presidential Race

The current and future president met Thursday for the first time in the Oval Office, in a kickoff to the transition period between now and Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

In remarks following their 90-minute meeting, both were vague on details about what was discussed. President Obama said “organizational issues in setting up the White House,” foreign policy, and domestic policy were on the agenda.

“I have been very encouraged by the—I think—interest in President-elect Trump's wanting to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces. And I believe that it is important for all of us, regardless of party, and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face,” said Obama, who’s been sharply critical of Trump’s capacity to lead. “Most of all,” Obama added, as he wrapped up his brief statement, “I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed. Because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

Trump, too, had positive reviews of the meeting, noting at one point that he intends to continue seeking “counsel” from the president—despite, it should be noted, leveling years of criticism at and sowing conspiracy theories about Obama.

“This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and we were just going to get to know each other—we had never met each other. I have great respect,” Trump said, presumably referring to his respect for Obama. “The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. And it could have, as far as I'm concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer. We really—we discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the really great things that have been achieved.”

The specifics of what the two discussed might not be clear till Obama writes his memoirs, but the two were clearly trying to present an image of unity. Reporters shouted questions after they delivered their statements, but they took none.

The Trumps’ schedule in Washington, D.C., is packed today. Melania Trump also met with the first lady, and Trump and the future vice president, Mike Pence, will meet with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Hill this afternoon.

Like many Americans, Kelly Dittmar stayed up to watch the election returns come in last night. Dittmar, a professor and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, was tracking dozens of down-ballot races with female candidates. There weren’t enough women running to yield a significant rise in women’s representation in Congress, but Dittmar and others at the center held out hope in some of the most competitive states.

Then things started going downhill for the woman at the top of the ticket.

“We were focused on that, but we were also wondering, what’s the story going to be for women more generally?” Dittmar, running on an hour of sleep, told me this afternoon. “And unfortunately, the story is also grim down ballot.”

Eighty-nine women won their races Tuesday night—six in the Senate, and 83 in House, including three non-voting delegates from Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C. Twenty-one women will serve in the next Senate, one more than in the 114th. Eighty-three will serve in the House, one seat fewer than in the current chamber. But overall female representation in Congress will remain unchanged, as female members retire or choose to leave Capitol Hill for other reasons; 104 women will serve in the next Congress, the same number that held seats in the current session.

"Women could only hold steady in this election instead of increasing their representation, which is what they have done in most every election in recent years," Dittmar said.

The numbers may be staying the same, but down-ballot female candidates still made history this year. The Senate added three women of color: Kamala Harris, who is of black and South Asian descent, in California; Tammy Duckworth, the daughter of a Thai mother and white father, in Illinois; and Catherine Cortez Masto, a Latina, in Nevada. Masto is the first Latina elected to the Senate. The trio joins Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, quadrupling the number of women of color in the chamber. Hirono became the first Asian American woman elected to the Senate in 2012.

In the House, Pramila Jayapal of Washington became the first Indian-American woman to be elected to Congress, and Lisa Blunt Rochester became the first woman and the first African American to represent Delaware. Only two states, Vermont and Mississippi, have never sent women to Congress.

In the last hour, one important race, the Senate contest in New Hampshire, was finally called. But the winner was added to the next Congress’s tally of female members long before that, before voters even cast their ballots; Both of the major-party candidates in that race, imcumbent Kelly Ayotte and challenger Maggie Hassan, are women.

Less than 24 hours after Tuesday’s upset victory, the American Civil Liberties Union vowed to fight President-elect Trump’s campaign proposals “with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step.”

The unusual statement underscores how far Trump’s campaign rhetoric strayed from the norms of American constitutional governance. Whether he will show the same lack of restraint in office is an open question, but the nation’s most powerful civil-liberties group is apparently assuming the worst. Its statement:

President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.

These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and 14th Amendments. If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step. Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers and millions of card-carrying members and supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights.

One thing is certain: We will be eternally vigilant every single day of your presidency. And when you leave the Oval Office, we will do the same with your successor as we have done throughout our nearly 100 years of existence. The Constitution and the rule of law are stronger than any one person, and we will see to that. We will never waver.

During the campaign, the ACLU described Hillary Clinton as “a strong defender of Americans’ civil rights and liberties in most respects,” while also criticizing her stances on immigration, surveillance, and targeted killing. At the same time, the organization labeled then-candidate Trump a “one-man constitutional crisis.”

On the night of the election, as the first polls began to close, President Obama told voters in a video message to “remember: No matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning.”

As results began to come in, that seemed like one of the only certainties in a grueling presidential race where everything—polls, pundits, projections—foreshadowed a Clinton presidency. But Trump triumphed, breaking through the so-called “blue wall,” the term used to describe states that have not voted Republican in years, and which Obama carried in each of his elections.

Sunrise, Obama said Wednesday afternoon, was “one bit of prognosticating that actually came true.” He called Trump to congratulate him early Tuesday morning, and has invited him to the White House on Thursday to discuss the transition of power.

“Now, it’s no secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences,” he said. “But remember: Eight years ago, President Bush and I had some pretty significant differences.”

Obama spoke from a lectern outside the West Wing, where next year the next administration will begin, as Trump has promised, to gut Obama’s legacy policies, including the Affordable Care Act.

Just days ago, Obama was taunting Trump at campaign rallies for Hillary Clinton. “You don’t see him hanging out with working people unless they’re cleaning his room or mowing the fairways on his golf club,” he said in Miami last week. “You’re gonna make this guy your champion if you’re a working person?”

On Wednesday, Obama said his team will work with the Trump campaign ensure a smooth transition. He said he was “heartened” by the plea for unity that Trump made during his victory speech.

The remarks were Obama’s first since Trump claimed victory in New York at about 3 a.m. ET. Trump’s win began to look likely hours before that, when the first returns from Florida showed a much tighter race than expected. Soon, states the Clinton campaign believed to be secure, even with razor-thin margins, flipped for Trump. Clinton called Trump to concede after Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two blue-wall states, were called for Trump.

Obama said Wednesday he “could not be prouder” of Clinton. “Her candidacy and nomination was historic and sends a message to our daughters all across the country, that they can achieve at the highest levels of politics,” he said.

But the majority of Obama’s speech was the verbal equivalent of a gentle pat on the back, a “there, there” to Democrats now forced to recede into a period of reflection. “The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward, and others think is moving back,” Obama said. “And that’s okay.”

Hillary Clinton didn’t expect to give this speech.

Almost a lifetime of working toward this Election Day. A year and a half of campaigning. A general election that had the Democratic nominee fairly favored to win.

But after conceding the election to Donald Trump in the Wednesday’s early-morning hours, she had to concede to the nation:

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I'm sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country,” Clinton said, from a stage inside the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. “But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together—this vast, diverse, creative, unruly, energized campaign. You represent the best of America and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”

The remarks were Clinton’s first since she called Trump, shortly before he gave his victory speech around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning. Her campaign had planned a jubilant event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan—whose glass ceiling would serve as an unsubtle metaphor—but supporters there last night left in shock after Trump’s unexpected upset. Clinton declined to address the crowd then, and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, spoke in her stead. “They're still counting votes,” he told the crowd, though by then Trump’s presidency seemed all but certain.

Trump struck a conciliatory tone toward Clinton in his speech last night, thanking her for years of public service and congratulating her for her hard work in the campaign. Clinton’s concession speech needed to strike a similar tenor to follow the American tradition of gracious losing in elections. She seemed to aim for a balance between acknowledging supporters’ anguish and calling for acceptance of Trump’s victory: The loss is “painful,” Clinton said, “and it will be for a long time.” But the country now owes Trump “an open mind and the chance to lead.”

Still, Clinton put her supporters on notice that it’s on them to stay engaged: “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power, and we don't just respect that—we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.”

Clinton’s speech had echoes of a previous one she’d given, when she conceded the Democratic primary to Barack Obama in 2008. Two elections ago, she told women supporters that while they hadn’t cracked the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” of the presidency “it's got about 18 million cracks in it.” On Wednesday, Clinton took note again of the women and girls who dreamed she’d become the first woman president, promising that “someday, someone will” break that ceiling “and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”  

In 2008, though, Clinton’s concession was likely an easier one for her supporters to take: Not only did it seem possible she’d run for president again, but she had the capacity then to embrace a future president whose values weren’t so different from her own.

“I have had successes and I’ve had setbacks—sometimes really painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional, public, and political careers. You will have successes and setbacks, too,” Clinton said. “This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it.”

Donald Trump’s stunning win is not lost on Paul Ryan.

“This is the most incredible political feat I have seen in my lifetime,” Ryan said. He later added: “He turned politics on its head.”

Ryan’s relationship with Donald Trump has been complicated. The House speaker distanced himself from the nominee throughout the election—and Trump responded. He refrained from endorsing Ryan in his House race until reversing his position. And most recently, Ryan said he would no longer defend Trump following the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape wherein he brags about groping women. That’s all in the past now.

Early on Wednesday morning, Ryan released the following statement congratulating Trump:

I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his incredible victory. It marks a repudiation of the status quo of failed liberal progressive policies. We are eager to work hand-in-hand with the new administration to advance an agenda to improve the lives of the American people. This has been a great night for our party, and now we must turn our focus to bringing the country together.

Ryan carried a similar optimistic tune during a news conference Wednesday. Still, he recognized the fractures within the country.

“There is no doubt our democracy could be very messy and we do remain a sharply divided country,” Ryan said. “But now as we do every four years, we have to work to heal the divisions of a long campaign. I think president-elect Donald Trump set the perfect tone last night for doing just this.”

Trump faces a Republican-led Congress. Ryan won his reelection battle at home, and touted Republicans who also secured victories on Tuesday. He also spoke fondly of Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, a long-time friend, who he’s said he’s talked to since Trump clinched a win.

“I think we are going to hit the ground running. We are already talking about getting our transitions working together,” Ryan said, referring to the president-elect. “We are very excited.”

President Obama has invited Trump, now the president-elect, to the White House on Thursday.

Obama called Trump Wednesday morning to “congratulate him on his victory,” according to a statement from the White House. He also called Clinton and commended her for the campaign she had run. On Thursday, Obama will brief Trump on the transition:

The President invited the President-elect to meet with him at the White House on Thursday, November 10th, to update him on the transition planning his team has been working on for nearly a year. Ensuring a smooth transition of power is one of the top priorities the President identified at the beginning of the year and a meeting with the President-elect is the next step.

Obama is expected to deliver a statement on Wednesday.

Donald Trump, who was elected the 45^th president of the United States, shared his first message on Twitter this morning:

Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2016

In 72 days, Donald Trump will be inaugurated the president of the United States.

Just before he addressed supporters, close to 3 a.m. ET Wednesday morning, the Associated Press called the race and Hillary Clinton phoned Trump to concede.

The Republican nominee, whose remarks tonight were expected to be those of concession, were instead those of victory.

“I just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us—it’s about us—on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign,” Trump said, with considerably less acrimony toward Clinton than he’d expressed previously in the race. “I mean—she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.”

Trump spoke from a ballroom in Manhattan’s Midtown Hilton, not too far from his campaign headquarters at Trump Tower and just two miles from Clinton’s own election-night event on the West Side. It’s a venue that just days ago seemed like an unusually understated choice, but today, covered in American flags and filled with supporters in “Make America Great Again” hats, was energized. Trump’s success tonight was, in a word, unexpected. Within a couple hours of the first polls’ closing, the chances of a Clinton blowout lessened, with Trump finishing strong in states like Florida and North Carolina. By late Tuesday, as Clinton’s survival hinged on her defending the “blue wall,” her defeat looked near-inevitable.

Trump told his cheering supporters they had a new task ahead of them, one that feels virtually impossible in the charged moments after the campaign’s end—uniting the country. “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division—have to get together,” Trump said. “To all Republicans and Democrats and Independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”

The president-elect promised to be “president for all Americans”—a pledge that would certainly seem suspect given Trump’s months of racist and misogynistic rhetoric. “This is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people—I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so we can work together and unify our great country,” Trump said.

After thanking his family and fellow Republicans for their help—and promising to “do a great job”—Trump walked off the stage to a song that’s become an anthem of his campaign: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Mike Pence appeared on stage with his wife and children to express gratitude for Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

“The American people have spoken and the American people have elected their new champion,” Pence said as he took the stage in New York City shortly before 3 a.m. ET.

The Indiana governor added: “I’m mostly grateful to our president-elect whose leadership and vision will make America great again.”

The big story of the night has been Donald Trump’s strength in the Midwestern states that comprise the so-called Democratic firewall––the states Hillary Clinton absolutely had to win to keep her White House hopes alive.

Wisconsin is no different. Considered to be a safe blue state, early in the night it became apparent that Trump would make a much stronger showing than expected. Shocking everyone, Trump won the state from the Democratic column, dooming Clinton’s White House hopes.

Hillary Clinton won’t be giving a speech tonight.

The presidential candidate’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, addressed supporters in New York City shortly after 2 a.m. ET. Clinton was not in the building.

“It’s been a long night, and it's been a long campaign. But I can say we can wait a little longer, can’t we?” Podesta said to loud applause. “They're still counting votes. Every vote should count.”

As of press time, Trump has a significant lead in the Electoral College count. Clinton was expected to win the race, but after the polls closed she couldn’t match up to Trump as state after state—states President Obama swept in 2008 and 2012—was called for his campaign.

Senator Pat Toomey has clinched a victory in Pennsylvania. If conservatives win seats in Louisiana and Alaska as expected, AP reports, the Republican incumbent just ensured the GOP will retain control of the Senate.

His margin of victory was narrow—less than 2 percentage points—but it was enough. Through the elections, opponent Katie McGinty did her best to lump Toomey in with Donald Trump, wagering that liberal-leaning Pennsylvanians would side with her out of distaste for the man at the top of the Republican ticket. Toomey himself avoided associating with Trump, putting off casting a ballot for the Republican nominee until just before polls in Pennsylvania closed.

But Trump proved popular in the Keystone State. Ironically, it’s possible his coattails gave Toomey just enough of an edge to land another term in the Senate—and, with the House still in Republican control, hand Trump a united Congress.

American voters unhappy with the outcome of presidential elections have long joked about absconding to the country’s northern neighbor. But this election they may be closer to seriously considering it, if Canada’s website for citizenship and immigration is any indication.

The site has crashed multiple times in the last few hours, showing visitors an “internal service error.”

The Canadian Immigration website has crashed. Seriously. #ElectionNight pic.twitter.com/XXSfCorTd1

— Cause We're Canadian (@MadelnCanada) November 9, 2016

Americans considering Canadian citizenship may take comfort in a video titled “Tell America It’s Great”—a play on Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. The clip, created by a marketing company in Toronto last month, features Canadians listing things they consider to be positive about the United States, like its national parks system, space program, and bluegrass music.

It’s well understood that Democrats rely on heavy support in urban areas to counterbalance Republican dominance in rural areas. But as I watch the returns trickle in tonight, it seems especially true this year. Hillary Clinton’s support in Pennsylvania is confined to the narrow swatch of suburbs surrounding Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; her only hope to win Wisconsin rests in running up a big total in Milwaukee to cancel out Donald Trump’s support in the rest of the state. Wayne County, which is home to Detroit, may decide which way Michigan goes.

The divide between city and country could mathematically decide this election. But that very same divide played a role in making Trump a viable candidate to begin with. The narrative of America has split: As prosperity increasingly becomes concentrated in cities, folks in the country see themselves being left behind. Many of Trump’s voters think America was at its greatest in the 1950s and 1980s. The Republican nominee’s success has shown that rural residents haven’t finished having their say.

Nevada was supposed to be one of the safer Sunbelt swing states for Hillary Clinton, thanks in part to high turnout among Latinos in the early-voting period and a Democratic political machine that spent nearly two years registering voters for 2016.

And safe it turned out to be: AP, CNN, and other networks project that the Democratic nominee has won the state and its six electoral votes. My colleague Ronald Brownstein reported this week that Nevada represented Clinton’s “best insurance policy if she loses any of the core [blue-wall] states she’s relying on”—this victory will probably bolster the spirits, if only temporarily, of the Clinton campaign as the results from those blue states are still coming in.

Around 10 p.m., I walked down to the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. At the temple that the Republican Party erected to Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator; at the foot of the steps where Martin Luther King, Jr., once dreamed that his children should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, three young Trump supporters came to drape themselves in the flag.

“We really thought that Clinton would sweep,” said David McCarthy, an 18-year-old freshman at American University. “It’s a classic underdog story.”

He and two of his classmates posed for pictures in front of the memorial’s columnade, grinning widely and holding up a Budweiser. All three were white, all three wore the requisite red baseball caps.

“I felt so excited watching the results come in on CNN. The fact of a Clinton presidency really scared me,” said Alex Workman, another 18-year-old freshman who was grinning.

Their classmates milled about next to them, carefully staying out of the frame. They all denied supporting Donald Trump, describing themselves as a group of friends who had wanted to come down to the Lincoln Memorial on the historic night regardless.

“I think that it’s so cool to experience being in DC for our first election,” said Alana Persson, another freshman at American University.  

“I’m from upstate New York, in a city called Geneva,” said Mark Rokow, her classmate. Geneva was about half-split between ardent conservatives and moderate liberals, he said. But coming down to college in D.C., he found that some of his more conservative-leaning ideas had been ridiculed by his classmate. He didn’t support Trump, but he did seem to find D.C. a culture shock.

Meanwhile, Workman and McCarthy grinned. Above all, they said they were happy that Trump had rejected the GOP’s social conservatism. “If Ted Cruz had won, Hillary would have beaten him in a landslide,” said McCarthy.

What they liked most about Trump most was his heterodoxy. “Everyone my age is pro-choice,” said McCarthy. He said his favorite policy of Trump’s was the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Both also wanted another Scalia on the Supreme Court. And both got very serious when I asked about climate change.

“We think it’s real and needs to be addressed,” said Workman. “I would just rather vote for someone who isn’t bought than someone who supports climate change.”

They were not the only visitors to the memorial. A couple dozen people stood around, clustering in couples and forming ad hoc groups. They sat on the steps and pawed at their phones. Most were tourists, and most said they supported Clinton, like the 61-year-old retired attorney who declined to provide her name.

“I voted for Hillary. We need brains and a pair of ovaries in the White House,” said a retired 61-year-old attorney from Chicago who declined to provide her name. “And if that offended some people here, well, okay.”

She sat in a wheelchair a couple feet from where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” Speech. She told me she was a single mother whose son, a marine on active duty, currently worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  

“This,” she said, gesturing at the memorial and her presence there, “is for my grandmother. She was the child of immigrants, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the ghetto, she got herself a college education, she married an attorney—and still she wasn’t allowed to vote,” she told me. The suffragette Lucretia Mott, she added proudly, was a distant relative.

Off to the side, a young white couple sat on the steps and pawed on their phones. They were both visiting from Seattle. “I can’t tell whether this is a bit of indigestion or our Brexit moment,” Philip Taron told me.

“We really didn’t realize how many people in America” support Trump’s ideas, said Kately Taron. “In Seattle, it’s a contest between the Democrat and the socialist.”

There were no answers yet, so they looked out across the mall, across the reflecting pool, beyond the Washington Monument, to the fully lit Capitol Building. At this distance, it seemed like shrunken by scale.

NEW YORK—Jerry Falwell Jr., the Liberty University president and evangelical leader, recently spoke to Donald Trump and found him “exuberant,” but not yet ready to declare victory. “I think he’s thrilled, but I don’t think he’s surprised,” Falwell told reporters as he walked into the Trump party at the midtown Hilton.

“What we’ve seen this year is a peaceful revolution by the American people, the common man, to take the country back from the elitists and the establishment—and it’s badly needed,” Falwell said. He dubbed the potential Trump upset “Trexit.”

Falwell said he would not serve in a possible Trump administration, but would continue to serve as a friend and informal adviser.

His endorsement of Trump was controversial in Christian-right circles, where many evangelical leaders felt differently. But Falwell said the results showed he was the one with his finger on the pulse of the religious right. “There was never any division among the rank and file evangelicals,” he said. “Only the leadership was divided.”

PHILADELPHIA—“I’m ecstatic,” said Joe DeFelice, the chairman of the Philadelphia GOP committee. “The internals that we’re tracking right now have us up 50,000 votes in Pennsylvania.”

This city has had quite a day. The staffers here said early reports suggested low turnout in the strongly Democratic, heavily minority precincts in Philly, while the more Republican areas to the northeast saw big numbers of voters. Poll volunteers said they had lines out the door at the start of the day on Tuesday; at the heavily Puerto Rican precinct in North Philly that I visited this morning, hardly anyone was there at the start of the day.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia GOP has been monitoring polls for suspected voter intimidation—and getting press for it. “I think the media we got in Philadelphia helped turnout in the rest of the state,” DeFelice said. “Our people were the ones who were getting harassed. Our people were the ones whose votes were being suppressed. Our people were the ones who were disenfranchised.”

Pennsylvania has not yet been called—it’s “the white whale,” as one volunteer put it. The people here are primed for victory, though. Volunteers posed for a jubilant photo a while ago, and the room was filled with cheers when Fox News—the network of choice for reporting on tonight’s returns—announced Trump had won Wisconsin.

DETROIT—For months, Representative Debbie Dingell warned Hillary Clinton’s advisers and her fellow Democrats that Donald Trump could win Michigan. For months, Dingell was ignored and mocked.

That is, until the closing days of the campaign when Clinton’s pollsters picked up a tightening of the race and dispatched their candidate, and a slew of surrogates to the state. On Sunday, Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, told Dingell she was right all along. Former President Bill Clinton also gave her private props.

Dingell is a longtime Democratic operative who succeeded her husband, John Dingell, in the state’s 12th District, which stretches from outside Detroit to vote-rich Ann Arbor. Frustrated with what she considered to be overconfidence on the Clinton team, Dingell implemented her own get-out-the-vote operation to boost Clinton in her district. In a close race, it might make the difference.

CNN projects Donald Trump the winner in North Carolina, after the Republican nominee racked up leads in rural areas, the suburbs and exurbs of Charlotte, and the western half of the state. Those gains offset Hillary Clinton’s successes in the liberal strongholds of Mecklenburg, Wake, Durham, and Guilford Counties. Early-voting results buoyed Trump campaign heading into Election Day, as Republicans and white voters made unprecedented gains in early-voting turnout, while black votes were depressed relative to 2012 levels. Those results—and the predictable results of voter suppression after multiple NAACP lawsuits in the state—set the table for a Trump victory.

Some exit poll analysis indicates that Republicans turned out at lower rates than expected on Election Day, but even if those polls are accurate, early-voting successes for Republicans and Trump’s base of rural white voters were strong enough to give the state to Republicans. Trump will collect the 15 electoral college votes from the state and deal a near fatal blow to Clinton’s chances of victory.

After a tight race in Florida, Donald Trump secured the state, giving him a path to victory and delivering a blow to Hillary Clinton.

Trump had won the state in the primary, but the state was expected to be a tight race between both candidates despite an uptick in Latino early-voting turnout. Latinos account for roughly 18 percent of the state’s eligible voters, according to Pew Research Center. Clinton had held a commanding lead against Trump among Latino voters throughout much of the election.

Her campaign had seemingly been banking on Latino voters in the state. This was a particular concern for Trump in Miami-Dade County, where Latinos make up 56 percent of registered voters. Trump officials were cognizant of that. A Trump campaign official told Bloomberg that “Miami-Dade County is the most important county in the country for Trump's chances.”

Trump trailed behind Clinton in Miami-Dade County, but appeared to win many of the northern counties, while Clinton held an advantage in southern counties, similar to the 2012 presidential race. Then, however, Cuban Americans in the state were split between Obama and Romney, a slice of the electorate that seemed to moving away from Trump. In the end, Cuban Americans appeared to back Trump over Clinton.

Florida offers 29 electoral votes.

Hillary Clinton has won Colorado, according to Fox News, CNN, and ABC News, keeping her slim hopes at the presidency alive.

Early reports of a Latino voter surge nationwide encouraged Democrats, but in many states, those gains were swamped by Donald Trump’s ability to run up large margins among white and rural voters. That didn’t happen in Colorado, but it may not be enough to rescue Clinton’s White House bid.

When Ilhan Omar was 8 years old, she and her family fled Somalia, her native country, and stayed in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. When she was 12, her family came to the U.S., and made their home among the large Somali American community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a teenager, she served as a translator for her grandfather as they attended caucuses for Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Laborer (D.F.L.) party, the state’s version of the Democratic Party. Politics stayed with her.

By 2014, Omar had become an aide to a city council member. At a neighborhood caucus that year, she was attacked during an altercation between supporters of rival candidates. One of those candidates was Rep. Phyllis Kahn, whose successful reelection to a 22nd term in the Minnesota House would make her its longest-serving legislator.

Tonight, Ilhan Omar took Phyllis Kahn’s seat. She will the first Somali American lawmaker in Congress, another first for a Muslim from the same state that made Keith Ellison the first Muslim congressman. Eight years after Barack Obama was elected president, there are still some stories that are possible in no other nation on earth.

Paul Ryan seems optimistic.

Speaking from his campaign headquarters in Janesville, Wisconsin, the House speaker thanked his supporters for reelecting him to his congressional seat—and hinted at his hopes for other election results tonight.

“I'm so eager to get back to work for you, to get on with fixing our country's problems. We have so much potential in this country, so much potential. And if we can just tap it—that's what’s ahead of us,” he said. “By some accounts, this could be a really good night for America. This could be a good night for us. Fingers crossed. I'm eager to watch.” Already tonight news networks have projected Republicans will keep the House, though Ryan’s future as speaker could be challenged by some in his caucus. For now, though, Ryan can breathe a little, as the speaker’s election won’t be held until next year.

Ryan didn’t reference the presidential race specifically in his remarks, mentioning only his fellow Wisconsinite Ron Johnson’s Senate race. But after months of showing inconsistent support for nominee Donald Trump, he spent recent days encouraging voters to pick Republicans up and down the ballot. His job as speaker—and passing GOP-led legislation—is easier with Republicans in the White House and dominating Congress.

Virginia ended up a much closer race than expected.

Polls in the state trended blue for most of the election, but a few late-breaking surveys showed Donald Trump in the lead. Hillary Clinton managed to eke out a victory in the Commonwealth, preserving her White House chances in a tense night for the Democratic nominee.

Clinton was rescued by the populous, Democratic-leaning northern areas of the state, which overwhelmed Trump’s margins in rural areas. But it has nevertheless been a grim night for the Democratic nominee, and her hopes for the White House remain slim.

NEW YORK—Top Democrats here at Hillary Clinton’s election-night party are still projecting confidence, but there’s clearly concern as her path to the presidency narrows.

“It’s tight, but we still have a lot of the country left to come in,” Representative Steve Israel, a Clinton ally in New York, told me. “We knew from the beginning that Donald Trump had to win Florida to stay alive. We have other places to go, but I’m confident that we’re in very strong shape.”

On the stage, Senator Charles Schumer tried to rally the crowd with a chant borrowed from the Naval Academy Prep School, by way of fans of the U.S. men’s national soccer team. “I believe that she will win! I believe that she will win!” Schumer shouted. Yet he did not repeat the prediction of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in assuming a Clinton victory. Schumer, who won reelection to his Senate seat easily, is poised to become the Democratic leader with the retirement of Nevada’s Harry Reid. But with key Senate seats now favoring Republicans, he is not likely to become majority leader.

Among the crowd, many partygoers had retreated to the food court in anticipation of a long night.

Even as he held out optimism for a Clinton win, Israel began to consider the implications of just how close the race had become and how much stronger Trump had performed than Democrats expected. “This election was not about the candidates,” Israel said. “It was about the time that we’re in. Donald Trump could never have run in any time other than the time we’re in right now. We’re witnessing a new convergence of pressures on the American public. The economy is changing radically. They’ve lost faith in institutions, in government, in sports, and in Wall Street. They feel threatened at home. You put it all together, and you have a very anxious environment that Donald Trump has tapped into.”

PHILADELPHIA—It’s giddy here in the Republican headquarters.

A while ago, the whole office applauded as a local victory was announced; someone recently broke out in song. Patti Vogler, who’s here with her husband and daughter, said she can feel the excitement of the night.

Trump is “not the status quo,” she said. “We keep getting the same-old same-old. Maybe the country really does need to be run like a business.” Another volunteer, Jerry Miller, said he’s “praying to God” that Trump wins. “It would be a huge weight off my shoulders. I don’t trust her.”

Meanwhile, across town, Democratic organizers are heading home from election parties, said Natalie Catin-St. Louis, the president of Philadelphia’s chapter of the National Organization for Women. “People are very nervous.”

As Vogler said, “It’s definitely going to be an interesting night.”

NEW YORK—At Trump’s election-night party in midtown Manhattan, the mood has taken a happy turn. The big screens in the ballroom, where an empty stage is set with flags, are set to Fox News, where the anchors and pundits are excitedly dissecting the too-close-to-call race in the swing states.

“So far so good!” former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer told me as she entered, predicting that Trump would win Florida. Just like in the Republican primary, she said, Trump was outperforming people’s expectations. “He went out there and he resonated with the public,” she said. “They want change. They want an outsider. They want somebody who’s going to fight for them.”

Donald Trump’s better-than-expected performance tonight has given U.S. stock futures the jitters. As polls began to close, futures rose as Hillary Clinton’s path to victory looked comfortable. But as the night wore on, and her prospects in Florida and in other states appeared to dim, futures tanked. Here’s what it looked like:

Brexit veterans will recognize the shape of tonight's Dow futures financial chart pic.twitter.com/wz0RUJtEbr

— Anthony Zurcher (@awzurcher) November 9, 2016

At about 9:30 p.m. ET, they were down more than 400 points.

Meanwhile Japanese stocks fell more than 2 percent in early trading. The U.S. dollar and the Mexican peso fell sharply while gold prices spiked.

Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat from Delaware, has won a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the first African American and the first woman to represent the state in Congress.

Rochester defeated her Republican challenger Hans Reigle, an aviation professor and former pilot. Rochester will take over the seat held by Democrat John Carney, who last year decided to leave the chamber and run for Delaware governor. Carney won that election Tuesday night, eight years after his first—and unsuccessful—bid for the job.

Rochester spent Election Night at the state Democratic Party headquarters in Dover, where she posed for selfies with supporters.

Rochester, who was born and raised in Wilmington, has several firsts to her name. Her successful primary in September was her first attempt at running for elect office. She was the first African American woman to serve as Delaware labor secretary under Tom Carper’s administration in 1993 and as state personnel director under Ruth Ann Minner’s administration in 2000.

PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—A framed portrait of Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania senator, greets visitors to the Republican headquarters here in northeast Philly. But from what I can tell, a lot of people in the state wouldn’t necessarily recognize his picture—or at least, they wouldn’t know much about what he represents.

“I like him. I don’t know enough about him. I did vote for him,” said Jim Schickling, a Republican who served as a judge of elections in a local ward. That’s a good summary of what I heard from voters in the city and two of the surrounding counties, Chester and Bucks, over the last couple of days—they may have gone for the Republican, but they don’t really know much about him.

This is incredible considering the massive amount of money that has been poured into television ads for the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania this year; residents complained that the commercials have been nonstop. Toomey, who’s competing against Democrat Katie McGinty, may have benefited from straight-ticket voting, but his numbers may suffer for his anonymity. While a lot of Republicans said they don’t know much about him, dedicated Trump supporters reportedly resent him for his refusal to support the presidential nominee. Toomey only announced he had voted for Trump on Tuesday afternoon. In a close race, those votes lost to ambivalence may matter.

Here’s some good news for a divided GOP: It looks like Republicans will retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

It was never likely that Democrats would recapture the lower chamber. But that didn’t stop liberals from hoping it might happen during an election where Donald Trump looked like a weak candidate at the top of the ticket. “I think anything is possible,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Politico in September.

That dream apparently won’t become a reality. ABC News and NBC News have both projected that Republicans will keep their House majority.

House Speaker Paul Ryan may be breathing a sigh of relief, but his worries aren’t over. Ryan will face defiant conservatives when he returns to Washington, D.C., including members who are upset he wasn’t always enthusiastic about his party’s nominee. And he’ll likely find it challenging to work with either Trump, given their disagreements during the campaign, or Hillary Clinton.

NEW YORK—A Hillary Clinton victory seemed less assured at 9 p.m. amid strong initial returns for Donald Trump in states like Florida and Virginia where polls and the early vote favored Clinton.

But Bill de Blasio wasn’t about to hedge.

In a speech at Clinton’s election-night party in Manhattan, the New York mayor sounded as if a win for the Democrat was already a foregone conclusion. “Tonight, America, we are going to make history, and not just because we are going to shatter that stubborn glass ceiling, and shatter it we will,” de Blasio said, in remarks that felt like a too-early-for-primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention. He predicted that Clinton would be declared the victor “in just a few hours.”

Clinton still has a broader path to the presidency if she can hold Virginia and the states in the upper Midwest and Rust Belt. But with night shaping up to be much longer than the Clinton campaign hoped for, de Blasio’s speech felt a tad premature.

PHILADELPHIA—If this election had its own glossary, the word “rigged” would be a crucial entry. Donald Trump has spoken extensively about the “rigged” process and has suggested he might not accept the outcome of the presidential race. In speeches about electoral corruption, he has often namechecked Philadelphia, suggesting that the exclusive Democratic turn-out that has sometimes happened in certain precincts is a result of fraud.

The city’s Republican Party has set up an extensive operation to track potential voter intimidation and irregularities in its headquarters here in Northeast Philly. Roughly 20 attorneys have been on call to respond to complaints and compile a record of ostensive misconduct. One of the lawyers, who requested not to be named because of the nature of his job, said complaints have ranged from typical reports of newly court-appointed poll watchers being turned away to alleged electioneering within the polling precincts, which is against the law.

Early on Tuesday evening, an hour or two before polls closed in Pennsylvania, stacks of complaints sat in piles on a long folding table in HQ. Each pile was labeled with the category of complaint and a tally of the number filed. A pile for rejected poll watchers was marked with fourteen complaints. “Extra person in booth” had two. “Machine problem” had six. “Dem interference” had three. “Voter ID problem” had four. “Dem literature at poll” also had four. “Discrimination / Intimidation” was marked with six. “Extra person in booth” had two. “Election official AWOL” only had one.

Specific complaints detailed everything from polling officials who didn’t know how to set up booths and technicians reporting that machines may have gone down to voters’ names not showing up on rolls and provisional ballots not being accepted. A few complaints described confrontations between registered poll watchers and precinct officials, or a random “politico” showing up and demanding ID from the precinct judge.

Attorneys are processing these complaints as they come in, sometimes elevating complaints to the Board of Elections or the district attorney’s office. Regardless of what Trump has said on the campaign trail, they’re not out to prove the election is “rigged”: “Campaign rhetoric and what’s actually happening are two different things,” said Tom Stoner, the Pennsylvania director of election-day operations for the Trump campaign. They get a lot of complaints that end up not being true—the “hearsay” calls, as Stoner called them, with voters reporting what their friend or neighbor or relative said about his or her precinct. “Half of what we end up doing is tamping down anxiety,” he added.  

Some of the complaints that come through are technical, like the ones about ballot machines, he said; others are volunteer mistakes that come from a lack of training or, occasionally, political motivations. “It’s not a widespread conspiracy at all,” he said. “It’s smaller mistakes.”

Particularly in Philadelphia, it can be hard to find volunteer poll watchers to staff all 1,682 voting precincts—an uncommonly large number for a city of this size, Stoner said. Recruitment difficulties are multiplied for the city’s minority party: “It’s extremely difficult to find Republicans to do it,” Stoner said. Minority-party poll workers and watchers complain that they face insults and judgment from people in their precincts; especially in areas where only a handful of Republicans live, “your average person needs this experience like a hole in the head,” Stoner said.

The party’s two big focuses have been voter irregularities and preparation for a recount—standard operations for a national election, Stoner said. Democrats in the city and non-partisan legal advocates set up networks of their own for Tuesday; the last few weeks leading up to the election were a circus of battling lawsuits in which Democrats and Republicans both alleged that the others were attempting to meddle with polling integrity. Despite the volley of allegations, officials from all sides explained their goal the same way: making sure people can vote without interference.

“I want to win, but I want it to be clean,” Stoner said. “I believe that in a democracy, you have to have observation. You cannot have one party or another ruling in any area that involves voting.” The attorneys may keep working on current complaints, he said, but with the polls now closed and the results soon to be determined, the Republican HQ hotline is shutting down.

Around 7 p.m. Tuesday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it was extending the hours of six precincts in Durham County, two for an hour a piece and four others for shorter periods.

That decision was the outcome of a sometimes befuddling Tuesday. Rumors of major problems in the county swirled all day, fed by reports from big national outlets and tweets from progressive celebrities like Wendell “Bunk Moreland” Pierce. On the ground, these rumors was perplexing. I’ve been driving around the area all day, trying to chase down what’s going on and finding little evidence to back up the concern.

Here’s what we know: This morning, poll workers at several precincts discovered that software used for checking in voters—but not for voting—was not functioning correctly. The Durham County Board of Elections called the state board, and together they decided to switch over to the county’s backup plan, which was to revert to paper registration across all precincts. That’s the method that was used every year up until now, but it does potentially slow down check-in, and with that lengthens wait times to vote.

In most polling places, that reportedly wasn’t a major problem. But at the Bethesda Ruritan Club in southwest Durham, poll workers ran out of paper forms required in the event of manual check-in, closing the polls for an hour and a half. It’s unclear how large an impact that had on voters. Volunteers and poll workers said there’d been some attrition, but no one knew how much.

I dropped in at a variety of polling places in late morning across the city, and they all said that while there’d been a line when the polls opened, things were quiet.

At 5 p.m., the county board of elections met downtown. Chairman Bill Brian, a Republican, seemed perplexed by the gossip—he’d been getting questions about widespread glitches and long lines from national reporters, but hadn’t heard about any himself, remarkable since the board had sent runners to every precinct to gauge the situation. The board ultimately voted to ask the state board to extend hours at Bethesda only. Brian pointed out that unless there was a mechanical or technical failure causing a 15-minute or more break, the state board would likely not approve extensions—meaning long lines alone were not grounds for extension. (He also noted that anyone in line when the polls close must be allowed to cast a ballot.)

People at the meeting had heard about long lines at North Carolina Central University, a historically black university in town, so I decided to go there. But the line was manageable there, too. Irv Joyner, a professor of law at NCCU who was part of the team that successfully sued the state to overturn an overhaul of voting laws, said there had been long lines in the late morning, reaching up to as long as two hours’ wait at 12:30, but the line had worked itself out. Some voters had dropped out of line—particularly students who had to get to class—but many had promised to return, and it was unclear how many had actually been lost.

Joyner seemed sanguine about turnout at Central and among African Americans overall. “For Durham, I think Durham stepped up. People were conscious that there were reports that African American turnout had decreased,” he said. That had helped drive later voters, he said.

From NCCU, I went on to Bethesda, arriving around 6 p.m.—just as the state Board of Elections was convening to consider requests to extend poll hours. Expecting to see long lines, I was surprised to find that there were more journalists and poll-watchers than voters. No one seemed to know what was going on or whether the hours would be extended. Poll workers still expected to close at 7:30 p.m. as scheduled. Longtime state Representative Mickey Michaux showed up, and a few minutes later so did Mayor Bill Bell, both Democrats. The two men were as confused as I was: They had heard reports of long lines around the city, but every time they got to a polling place they found short lines or none at all. As far as I can tell, the accurate reports of problems with the check-in software had morphed into reports of widespread, endless lines and further glitches after being injected into the national news.

Meanwhile, around 7 p.m.—just a half hour before scheduled poll closing—the state board announced that it would be extending hours at the six precincts. I was at Bethesda, listening in to the state board meeting via a telephone on speaker, and a Democratic Party official and I cracked up as board officials asked whether anyone knew what the line looked like there. We knew there was none, but no one on the phone knew.

It’s hard to know whether the extensions might have a material effect, given how short the actual lines are. Extending voting hours to account for glitches is probably the right thing to do as a matter of principle, but given the late hour at which the extensions were granted, it’s likely to be tough to inform voters who might have headed home. No one knows what the rate of attrition was when the lines were long. Short lines could mean bad news for Democrats, since Durham is a Democratic redoubt, but it might also be a factor of heavy early voting in the country. Only one thing was clear: Whatever you might have heard on Twitter, there were no long lines to speak of in Durham.

NEW YORK—Thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters have already packed into the Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan, and they are cheering just about every new batch of votes as they stand watching large-screen TVs in front of a stage shaped like a map of the United States.

But there are thousands more Clinton fans outside the convention center. The campaign closed off four blocks along 11^th Avenue for a block party, and people are packed in watching the returns and listening to music outside. With results trickling in, there is no word yet on when Clinton will speak, but the campaign clearly chose the Javits Center with hopes of a victory in mind: The Democratic nominee and potential first woman president will speak underneath a giant glass ceiling.

Donald Trump is not known for modesty or restraint. But the Republican nominee and his allies aren’t sounding very confident as they anticipate the result of the presidential election.

The Washington Post has a round-up of the various ways that Team Trump appears to be offering up excuses for a less than stellar performance and downplaying expectations.  

Trump insisted he’s “going to win” on Fox & Friends, but didn’t seem to back that assertion up with much. "We're going to win a lot of states. I mean, who knows what happens ultimately," he said.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer didn’t sound much more optimistic.

Conway told MSNBC that Trump "didn’t have the full support of the Republican infrastructure" and that it would be "really too bad” if Trump lost because Bush and former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn't support him. [...]

Earlier in the day on Fox News, Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer seemed to suggest that success would be judged not by victory overall, but by winning states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012 and doing better than John McCain and Mitt Romney.

"We are going to have more electoral votes tonight than we’ve had in the last two cycles, and I think that’s an important thing to note for all of the media, mainstream media narrative," Spicer said. "We will do very, very well tonight. We will bring millions of people into this process, and I think we’ll see a resounding victory in more and more states that Obama carried twice.”

It sounds like Trump allies are attempting to preemptively spin what may be an election loss for the GOP nominee. The Trump campaign is no stranger to expectation-lowering. The Republican nominee’s allies engaged in plenty of that ahead of the presidential debates. And it’s not too surprising that his campaign would engage in it now. Even before the counts started coming in, FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 election forecast has Trump at just a 28.6 percent shot of winning the presidency compared with Clinton’s 71.4 percent likelihood.

Colorado Democrats are trying to get a court order to keep the state’s polling places open an extra two hours after electronic voting systems failed temporarily earlier in the day.

The state Democratic Party filed an injunction in Denver District Court Tuesday afternoon, The Denver Post reports. The state’s voter-registration system went down in parts of the state for 29 minutes just before 3 p.m. local time, according to the state secretary’s office, which first reported the outage on Twitter. During the outage, voters cast provisional ballots instead, or waited until the system was back up and running again.

The filing states the outage caused “substantial delays at polling locations across Colorado, and those delays have the potential of disenfranchising voters who were unable to vote during the regular voting hours today.” It blamed “failures within the computer servers of the Secretary of State’s office.”

Lynn Bartels, a spokeswoman for the state secretary, said on Twitter that the office is opposed to extending voting time. “This outage didn’t stop anyone from voting,” she said.

A hearing on the injunction will be held tonight. Polls in Colorado will close at 7 p.m. local time, unless a judge rules otherwise.

Hillary Clinton holds a 61-point advantage against Donald Trump among Latino voters, according to a Latino Decisions national election eve poll, with Clinton winning 79 percent of Latinos to Trump’s 18 percent.

The Democratic nominee’s commanding lead marks a stunning descent for the Republican Party, which in 2012, called for a greater emphasis on minority outreach after Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of Latino voters, which was then the lowest percentage for a Republican presidential candidate since Bob Dole in 1996, and far lower than George W. Bush’s 40 percent support in 2004. Trump, who announced his candidacy with remarks denigrating undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, was expected to do poorly among Latino voters––an expectation that appears to have been justified.

According to Latino Decisions, 800 of the respondents interviewed were from Florida––about half of whom said Trump was “hostile” to Latinos. A poor showing among Latinos in Florida, particularly within the Republican-leaning Cuban American community, would hamper Trump’s chances of securing a victory not just in the state, but in the election. The Sunshine State has also seen a spike in Latino early-voting turnout. Here’s The New York Times with more on the surge:

In Florida, voters who indicated they were Hispanic on their voter registration form represent more than 15 percent of the early vote. In 2012, Hispanic voters were just 12 percent of the final electorate.

The numbers are striking in part because of the sheer magnitude of the early vote so far. Already, more than 6.4 million total voters have cast their ballots in the state — equal to 75 percent of the final turnout in 2012. In total, as many Hispanic voters have already cast ballots in Florida’s early voting period as cast ballots in all of 2012.

Outside voter organizations have made a concerted effort to mobilize Latino voters. The Latino Decisions poll shows that Latinos were contacted more by Democrats than by Republicans.

John Kasich doesn’t like Donald Trump. He’s one of the only former Republican candidates for president to refuse to support his party’s nominee, and he was the last one standing between Trump and the nomination—albeit very briefly—at the end of the primary.

Even before Election Day, the Ohio governor seemed to be positioning himself as a post-Trump leader of the Republican Party, a mild-mannered conservative who’d work to win back Republicans temporarily alienated by Trump. And on Thursday, it seems the Ohio governor is planning a speech to lay out how he might undertake that effort.

Here’s the Cincinnati Enquirer’s report, based on two sources “with knowledge of the plans”:

Kasich plans to give a speech less than two days after polls close in this election, casting his vision for the future of the Republican Party after his vocal opposition to current GOP nominee Donald Trump. …

Kasich is mulling a possible 2020 bid for president, although he does not plan to launch that bid Thursday. He hopes to be a part of the conversation as the GOP takes stock after a possible loss to Democrat Hillary Clinton. He has routinely spoken out against Trump this fall and is likely to give the speech even if Trump wins, one of the people said.

A Clinton win would, of course, seem the better outcome for Kasich—as it’d make his task of excising Trump from Republican Party leadership a whole lot easier.

DETROIT—My daughter Holly, a reporter with the Detroit News, covered Bill Clinton at a campaign stop last week and introduced herself afterward. He paused, raised an eyebrow and said, “Wait. You’re Ron Fournier’s daughter?”

He asked about Love That Boy, a parenting memoir I published in April, which included a chapter on Clinton’s visit with Holly’s brother, Tyler. (In 2010, after Tyler was diagnosed with autism at age 12, my wife sent Tyler and me on a series of road trips to presidential sites, capped by visits with Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.)

Clinton told Holly he recently was watching polar bears on a nature show and thought about Tyler. That’s because during his visit to Clinton’s penthouse apartment in Little Rock, my son noticed a book cover with two polar bears fighting and sparked a conversation with the former president about how rare it was to capture such an image. Clinton pulled the book off his bookshelf and gave it to Tyler.

Why do I share this story? Partially out of parental pride: Holly moved to Detroit out of college, started her career, got married, adopted a child, and is a major reason why my wife, Lori, Tyler, and I moved back to Detroit this fall. Also, my publisher likes it when I write about the book. But mostly, you’re reading this because Holly’s brief exchange with Clinton is a reminder that people in public service, however flawed, are people. They are essentially, mostly, decent people who got into the business for the right reasons.

For months, according to friends and associates, Clinton has fumed over my coverage of his wife's campaign, particularly the email scandal (from here to here). They say he doesn’t understand why I’ve been so mean. After all, Clinton privately argued, he made my career. I don't blame him for being angry.

But he was nothing but gracious to Holly. In fact, the Clintons have been nothing but kind to me and my family over the nearly three decades I’ve covered them.

After I sent Hillary Clinton a copy of Love That Boy, she sent me a congratulatory note. She didn’t have to do that. By April of this year, Hillary Clinton certainly knew that an act of kindness wouldn’t curb my coverage.

President Obama likes to mock my criticism of his leadership. But you should have seen how kind he was to Tyler. You should have seen Michelle Obama wrap Tyler in a hug on our first road trip; it was actually a brief photo opportunity at a White House Christmas party. Normally, Tyler doesn’t like hugs.

When Bush was in office, I challenged his leadership and honesty during the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. And yet, eight days after our visit with Clinton, Bush met with Tyler and connected with him in a way I never could.

Three years ago, as Bush was preparing to open his presidential library, I wrote a column titled, “Go Ahead, Admit It: George W. Bush Is a Good Man.” I made this point: “For as much time as we spend understanding our presidents' policies and politics, relatively little effort is spent trying to understand them as people. We mythologize them as candidates and demonize them as presidents, denying our leaders the balm that soothes mere mortals: benefit of the doubt.”

In that column, I recalled something Bill Clinton told me a few days before he left Arkansas to become president: "You don't check your humanity at the Oval Office door."

Nearly 30 years after we both moved to Washington, this famously flawed man—a good man—found the humanity in a nasty business. Clinton put a hand on Holly’s shoulder and turned to other reporters at the Detroit coffee shop, telling them “her father used to cover me.” And now it was Holly’s turn, at least for one morning.

(Ron Fournier is associate publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business.)

Earlier in the day, Pat Toomey, the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, wouldn’t reveal whether he’d vote for Donald Trump. Since Pennsylvania is a Democratic-leaning state, Toomey was hoping to avoid alienating moderate voters turned off by Trump. Looks like he made up his mind to go public shortly before the Keystone State’s polls closed:

.@SenToomey just cast his ballot - for Trump. Waited until last possible moment to vote, hoping to rack up crossover votes & pacify GOPers.

— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) November 8, 2016

Forget elementary-school gyms: Some voters cast their ballots in truly unusual locations this Election Day. As polls come to a close across the country, here’s a glimpse of a few spots caught by Reuters photographers.

NEWTOWN, Pa.—Shane Wenner, a 44-year-old resident of Yardley, Pennsylvania, had never really been involved in politics before. He had never knocked on doors or made calls to potential voters or obsessively followed a campaign.

And then, Donald Trump came along.

Brenda Hart, a 55-year-old woman from Langhorne, said she experienced the same thing. This is something I heard on Tuesday from volunteers and voters across Bucks County, an area that’s nearly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Trump has inspired people to vote for the first time, volunteer with campaigns, and follow politics more closely. Whether he wins or not—and they think he will—they’re going to stay involved, they said.

The Trump-Pence “Victory Headquarters” here was “bumping” on Tuesday afternoon, at least according to a campaign volunteer named Katie—reporters were not permitted inside. I was allowed to stand outside the door—as Katie explained to one older gentleman as she was showing me out, “a kind reporter—that’s kind of an oxymoron, no offense—wants to interview volunteers.” From the foot traffic in and out of the office, it seemed like “bumping” was accurate—volunteers of all ages, almost all of whom were white, passed through over the course of an hour or so.

Hart and Wenner spoke with me on their way out of the office, joined by Bernie Wedo, a 61-year-old from Bristol Township who has worked on a number of Republican campaigns. They cited a lot of reasons for supporting Trump. His tone: “What you see is what you get,” Hart said. His credentials: “He’ll bring a business-type expertise” to politics, Wenner said. The economy: Lower Bucks, in the southern part of the county, “has been such a blighted area for so long, and no one has really come in with economic programs to help the people” until now, Wedo said.

All three volunteers agreed that health care is one of the biggest problems in the United States right now. “That’s what’s going to win Trump the presidency: Obamacare,” Wedo said. Hart said she cried when she got a notice about her new insurance premium, which will go up significantly starting in January. She and her husband just spent money getting their roof fixed, she said, but they would have “let the roof go” if she had known her health insurance would cost so much. They all said Republicans will fix the health-care system or else face the consequences from voters, but they disagreed about specifics. “I’d like to see the insurance companies no longer for-profit,” Hart said. Wenner frowned. “The problem,” he explained quietly, “is that’s like being for socialized medicine.”

It wasn’t just that Obamacare had failed, though—they argued that the mainstream media has not held Obama accountable for creating a massive, expensive, dysfunctional system. This is the biggest reason why they got involved with Trump and found so much to be enthusiastic about in his campaign: He doesn’t just want to change policy. He wants to disrupt the establishment, which includes biased media and big government.

Wedo wore a black shirt with Clinton’s face painted like the Joker from Batman: “Hillary for prison, 2016 and beyond,” it said on the back. It was a shirt from InfoWars, the broadcast program run by Alex Jones, who regularly discusses the dangers of globalization and various right-wing conspiracy theories. Wedo and Wenner both said they watch InfoWars—they used to think it was “too far out,” but “a lot of the things he was saying are really happening.” They said they don’t trust the “mainstream media,” and particularly the television-news networks; they prefer sources like Breitbart, the website that has been running pro-Trump coverage of this election and whose former chairman is Trump’s campaign CEO. “When you’re immersed in this new, alternate media landscape, and you watch CNN, you can see the bias,” Wenner said.

They believe Trump will win, and that he will take their state. But if in an alternate universe Clinton wins, they said, they have found a new way of engaging with politics. “I think Trump supporters should boycott NBC, ABC, and CNN, and send a message to Fox News that they used to be on our side,” Wedo said. Wenner said he would “stay politically active and continue to boycott the mainstream media.” He has a new interest in local politics, which is important but often overlooked, he said.

These volunteers embody Trump’s legacy: Whether or not he becomes president, he has given some Americans a new sense of political identity. He has helped confirm their suspicions about the media—the coverage of Trump has been extremely biased, they said. And he has given them a reason to get involved, and stay involved, in the electoral process.

A few days back, The New York Times published an inside look at the Trump campaign in its final days, a pretty intimate read. It noted that the candidate’s advisers had finally seized control of @realDonaldTrump, the Twitter account that offered a direct line of communication to Trump’s amygdala.

Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully—and often counterproductively—savage his rivals. … Taking away Twitter turned out to be an essential move by his press team, which deprived him of a previously unfiltered channel for his aggressions.

Since then, the candidate’s Twitter presence has mostly featured event announcements and bland exhortations to #DrainTheSwamp (a phrase Trump apparently doesn’t even like). But today … this?

TODAY WE MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2016

And this?

Just out according to @CNN: "Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2016

For the record, the voting machines that went on the fritz were in southern Utah, which has not yet been put in charge of the “entire country.” But these tweets seem so quintessentially Trump: confident, yell-y, a little bit wrong. And when I looked at the metadata, I noticed they were sent from an Android phone—one of the surest indicators that Trump himself is tweeting. It appears Trump has his phone back, at least for one more night.

With only a short time left until the polls close, third-party candidate Evan McMullin got a late-breaking endorsement that happens to be fairly high-profile: South Carolina senator and former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham.

I voted @Evan_McMullin for President. I appreciate his views on a strong America and the need to rebuild our military. #3

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) November 8, 2016

Graham had long said he wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, but he hadn’t publicly indicated for whom he’d be voting instead. "At the end of the day, if you're not worried about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton being president of the United States, you're crazy,” the three-term legislator told CNN in September. “Look at both of them."

Few other prominent voices—outside of conservative media circles—have backed McMullin, the Mormon former CIA operative who launched his campaign in August on the premise he could provide safe harbor to conservatives put off by Trump’s candidacy. But that lack of support doesn’t seem to have hurt him in his home state of Utah, where his bid has complicated matters for Trump and Clinton.

According to Jonathan Martin of The New York Times, George W. Bush and Laura Bush refused to cast a ballot for Donald Trump.

NEWS: George W. & Laura Bush did not vote for Trump. They left the presidential line empty & cast votes for downballot GOP candidates

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) November 8, 2016

That’s not entirely surprising. As David Graham has noted in his round-up of where Republicans stand on Trump an aide to Bush 43 told The Texas Tribune back in May that the former president “does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign.”

Still, although Bush signaled it was coming, it’s quite a rebuke for a former GOP president to withhold his support, even in the voting booth, from the current GOP nominee.

Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte is near the end of a tough reelection battle in New Hampshire.

Ayotte has tried to keep her distance from her party’s nominee as she goes head-to-head against Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan. But as has been the case for a number of GOP down-ballot candidates in competitive races, that’s a complicated task.

Ayotte and Trump have a fraught relationship. The first-term senator has said she’d vote for Trump, but not endorse him. Following the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, wherein Trump brags about groping women, Ayotte changed her stance and said she would not vote for him.

Hassan, for her part, has aligned herself with the Clinton-Kaine ticket, and criticized Ayotte for her shifting positions on Trump.

Ayotte and Hassan were poised for a difficult race from the start. Politico writes:

The New Hampshire Republican was already on the hot seat before Trump arrived on the scene—forced to defend her generally conservative voting record in a state with a famous independent streak, in a Democrat-friendly election year, against perhaps the best Democratic Senate recruit in the country in popular incumbent Gov. Maggie Hassan.

The New York Times notes that “the race has cost about $100 million, a jaw-dropping sum for such a small state.” Ayotte has a slight edge over Hassan, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.

In California this year, a record 19.4 million citizens were registered to vote in this election. At an Orange County polling place, in the city of Costa Mesa, where I grew up, that translated into an afternoon wait time of zero minutes at a couple polling places that I visited.

Elsewhere there were voters who waited a lot longer to cast ballots. “At least 150 people were waiting to vote at the North Hollywood Amelia Earhart Regional Library in Los Angeles before it opened. Long lines were reported at polling places across the city, as voters hoped to cast their ballots before heading to work,” the Associated Press reports. “In Northern California, a steady stream of cars pulled up to an absentee ballot drop-off station outside a courthouse in Oakland. And at a columbarium in San Francisco that served as a polling location, people filled out their ballots on steps next to urns and crypts after officials ran out of voting booths.”

In general, California is not known for long voting lines.

The biggest Election Day problem, so far, has been in Azusa, an L.A. County suburb. “One person was killed and at least three others were wounded Tuesday in an active shooting near a polling place,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Scroggin said police were dealing with at least one suspect who was heavily armed. At least one of the victims was headed to the polling station to vote, a law enforcement source said. The gunman immediately fired at least 20 shots at police, said the source. Under a hail of gunfire, officers took cover and returned shots at the man, who retreated into a home in the 500 block of Fourth Street.”

Hillary Clinton will win California’s 55 electoral votes, of course, but we’re hours away from knowing the outcome of its Senate race and ballot measures, including one to eliminate the death penalty and another to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Stay tuned.

On Friday morning, volunteers at the Alamance County Republican Party office in Burlington, North Carolina, discovered graffiti on the side of their building. Scrawled on the side of the low-slung yellow-brick structure, someone had written “Fuck Trump Yessir.”

That didn’t sit well with Nievelis Bittmann. After all, she figured, U.S. citizens have plenty of ways to express themselves politically without resorting to vandalism. “Don’t say it that way! We are a free country,” she said. “If you did that in Cuba, you’d go to jail immediately. You would not be alive, sweetie!”

Bittmann knows a thing or two about Cuba. She said her husband was imprisoned by the island’s Communist government for 12 years for attempting to escape the country. She eventually left the island for the United States in 1967, flying from Varadero to Opa-Locka, Florida. Bittmann told me that early on, she had supported the Castro regime, but quickly changed her mind when she saw it in action. As a schoolteacher, she lived in constant fear of saying the wrong thing and being unwittingly informed upon by a student.

Bittmann is 76 years old, can’t be more than about 50 inches tall, and has boundless energy. A devout Catholic, she became a Republican during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when she was horrified by the lack of morality on display. Now she’s a regular volunteer for the party, and she was hanging out at the office on Election Day, decked out in red, white, and blue and Trump-Pence stickers. “This place, it fills you up!” she said. Since family members had moved from North Carolina to South Carolina, fellow GOP volunteers had become a surrogate family for her. “This is all I have, my Republican friends,” she joked. As she talked, other volunteers teased her about her penchant for chatting. The rest came and went, nibbling on wraps and handing out brochures and signs as Fox News played quietly in the background. On a table, volunteers had been invited to write their names down and add them to a “basket of deplorables.”

But Bittmann’s commitment to Trump was not just social.

“I love this country,” she said. “When I make my citizenship, I promised to fight for it. There’s a lot of ways to fight. You don’t need a rifle.”

Many of her Latino friends don’t share her political views, which are common among Cuban émigrés of her age group but unusual among Latinos more broadly, who lean Democratic. In fact, many younger Cubans are more liberal than their parents and grandparents, having been born in the United States and never having experienced communism firsthand. She said she usually tries to avoid talking politics with her family, but she had urged her nephew in a text to think of his children when he voted, and she said he was backing Trump.

When Bittmann discovered that another reporter and I spoke her mother tongue, she was delighted, and excitedly held forth on a range of topics, switching between English and Spanish.

• On President Obama’s moves to normalize relations with Cuba: “¡Malísimo!” Very bad, and only likely to give new life to the Castro regime.
• On why reports that Trump had dabbled in establishing businesses in Cuba didn’t bother her: “Everybody is doing it. He’s a businessman”—although she said it would bother her if he did it now that he’s entered politics.
• On why she opposes illegal immigration: “Es un país de leyes.” It’s a country of laws. Working as a volunteer interpreter for the local police (she is retired), she said she saw many Mexicans and Salvadorans without papers.
• On Ted Cruz, the son of a Cuban émigré: “Very intelligent, but you have to have charisma.” She was a big fan of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, also the son of Cubans, though.

Now, however, she was all in for Trump, if largely out of a desire to stop Clinton and a fear of what she might do to the country. “I want to die free,” she said.

A Nevada judge soundly rejected a lawsuit by the Trump campaign on Tuesday that sought to “sequester” polling records, voting machines, and ballots from four early-voting locations in Las Vegas.

The Trump campaign filed the lawsuit Tuesday against Joe Gloria, the Clark County Registrar of Voters, accusing him of wrongly keeping four polling locations open late for early voting on Friday.

In a filing for the court, the campaign claimed that Gloria’s alleged efforts to keep polling locations open “appear to have been intentionally coordinated with Democratic activists in order to skew the vote unlawfully in favor of Democratic candidates.”

But during a hastily assembled hearing, Clark County District Court Judge Gloria Sturman criticized virtually every aspect of the Trump campaign’s legal arguments, including fundamental procedural flaws like providing notice to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office and exhausting their administrative options before turning to the courts.

“Aren’t we missing like seven steps in the process?” Sturman asked Trump campaign lawyer Brian Hardy.

Sturman also expressed concern that the records could be used to harass and intimidate volunteer poll workers.

“Do you watch Twitter? Do you watch any cable news show?” she asked Hardy. “There are, in the internet vernacular, trolls who could get this information and harass people who just want to help their fellow citizens vote. Why would I order them to make available to you information about people who work at polls when it’s not already a public requirement to do so, so that those people can be harassed for doing their civic duty?”

Sturman also described the campaign’s request to preserve evidence of how people voted as “offensive,” saying it contradicted “the principle that the vote is secret.” At several points in the hearing, she seemed unable to contain her disbelief at what she was being asked to do.

Polling places throughout Nevada saw extraordinary turnout on the final day of early voting last Friday. In Clark County, the state’s most populous county by far, Nevada Democrats typically use early voting to build a “firewall” before Election Day, when the state’s more conservative voters tend to cast their ballots.

In his live blog of the state’s early-voting patterns, Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston concluded that Trump and Nevada Republicans would need “a miracle on Election Day” to overcome the likely Democratic lead in ballots.

National attention has focused on North Carolina’s role in the presidential race and on the state’s Senate contest, but voters here are also deciding a heated race for governor, with incumbent Pat McCrory, a Republican, facing off with Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

Cooper looks like he came straight from central casting to play the part of governor, the kind of guy who seems like he was born in a sport coat and whose hair is always perfect; now he’s trying to claim the role. He was at Durham’s Southern High School late Tuesday morning, looking perfectly pressed even though he’d been out late at Hillary Clinton’s midnight rally in Raleigh and up early to campaign. “I feel great,” he told me. “I think it’s very positive for our state. I think people are ready for change here in North Carolina and ready to tell the rest of the country who we really are.”

Telling the rest of the country who we really are has been Democrats’ code word for House Bill 2, the controversial “bathroom bill” passed this spring that requires that transgender people use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. It also bans LGBT non-discrimination ordinances and prohibits living wages. Cooper’s advertisements have focused heavily on education, but much of the media coverage of the race has focused on HB2. He blamed McCrory for that.

“I think that the governor has spent a lot of time talking about the issues around House Bill 2 and started this whole issue with his wanting to make this part of the social ideological agenda that he has,” he said. “It has backfired, and I think the people of North Carolina don’t want discrimination written into our law.”

Of course, the test of that will come with the vote tallies tonight. I asked him what he’d be watching for as the results streamed in.

“I leave the political analysts to do that,” he said with a grin and a shrug. “Just as long as we have more at the end of the day, I’m OK with that.”

Guam overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, but it won’t do much to help the Democratic nominee secure a win—the territory does not have any representation in the Electoral College.

Still, Guam does serve as a predictor of sorts of which candidate may clinch the White House. For the last 32 years, Guam has predicted the winner in almost every presidential race. The only exception, The Los Angeles Times notes, is 1996, when “an election-day typhoon disrupted voting.” By the time Guam went to the polls, Bill Clinton had already won the election.

For those betting on Guam as a bellwether, take note: Seventy-two percent of Guam’s 32,000-odd voters backed Clinton, compared with 24 percent for Trump.

BENSALEM, Pa.—Outside the polling station at Bensalem High School, Pat Kelly and Joyce Jacober seem to be getting along famously. He’s a 19-year-old member of the Operating Engineers, Local #542, handing out literature for Democrats at the “strong encouragement” of his union leaders. She’s a 66-year-old lifelong Republican, married to a former Marine, who describes herself jokingly as “one of those deplorable women for Trump.” They’re spending the day together, so they might as well be friendly, but that’s not how things have been in their area recently, they said.

Jacober has been afraid to put a Trump bumper sticker on her car. Kelly said most of his friends are pro-Trump, and they shout things like “Build the wall!” and “Make America great again!” when they’re out in bars. A lot of folks are fed up with both candidates: One woman said she flipped a coin in the parking lot to determine who to vote for, Jacober and Kelly reported.

This is Bucks County, one of the “collar counties” that surrounds Philadelphia. Although it has gone blue in every presidential election since 1988, recent races have been close: Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney here by slightly more than 1 percentage point in 2012. It’s one of the counties with swing potential this year, in part because new voters are apparently turning out in large numbers.

The crowds have been “humongous,” said George Flocco, a 74-year-old local Republican committeeman. He’s lived in Bensalem with his wife for 47 years, he said, and he’s never experienced anything like it: “I saw people I never see at the polls.” Inside the high school, people stood in moderate lines divided by district—grocery-store-checkout-line long, not Thanksgiving-airport-security long. It seemed to be a pretty prominent polling station: A Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, Steve Santarsiero, stopped by with his camera crew to greet voters.

Jim Morris, 61, is one of the first-time voters Flocco was referring to. He and his wife, Lourdes, came to the polling station decked out in Trump gear: he with a black Trump-for-president shirt, she with a “Make America Great Again” hat and matching red sweatshirt. Until this year, he identified as a Democrat, he said, but has never shown his support at the polls because politicians “are all crooks,” he said. He believes Trump can “bring back the things I was used to growing up,” which is why he decided to come out on Tuesday. “People here [illegally] are taking my work,” he said. He’s a general contractor, and while he acknowledged that Trump allegedly “stiffed” hundreds of dishwashers, painters, waiters, and other workers like him, “I’m looking beyond that,” he said. He and his wife believe the Republican nominee will support veterans and strengthen the military, and complained about high Obamacare premiums, partly driven by subsidies to the poor. “If I have to work and pay for my care, so does every one else,” Jim said. Lourdes said her admiration for Trump is more of a personality thing. “I love his arrogance,” she said. “I believe people with arrogance say what they’re going to do and do what they say.”

Nineteen-year-old Daniah Abdulhussein, a biology student at Bucks County Community College, is also a first-time voter—and she’ll cast her ballot for Clinton. “Despite the things she has done, he has a higher chance of not making America great again,” she said. No one else in her family is voting this year, but “I definitely feel responsible” to vote, she said. “I’ve been hearing a lot about it—teenagers and social media, you feel like you’ve got to speak up and be heard.” She loved Barack Obama as president and said he’s one of the reasons why she’s voting for Clinton: “He would vote for her.”

Even though Pennsylvanians are considering a number of competitive down-ballot races this year, including the Katie McGinty-Pat Toomey race for U.S. Senate, few of the voters in the polling station seemed to care about elections other than the presidential. The advertising for the other campaigns in Pennsylvania has been intense, said E.R. Marsh, 77. “They’re almost as bad as the presidential people have been—talking too much about each other.”

Long-time voters like Marsh, who cast her first ballot for John F. Kennedy, seem to be just as dissatisfied with politics and elections as the new voters. “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not all for Clinton,” said Mary Pastman, a petite, blonde 66-year-old. But “I can’t vote for Trump—he’s too much of a wild card.” She cares about education, the economy, and “helping the middle class that really, really needs the help,” but she’s unsatisfied with her options. “This is the first election I’ve voted in that I don’t want to vote for either candidate,” she said.

Flocco, the Republican poll volunteer, said he’s supporting Trump, but he’s choosing the “lesser of two evils.” He doesn’t like the way Trump talks about women—“I’ve got a wife and grandkids, and I’ve never talked like that in my life,” he said. Some people in Bensalem are definitely supporting the candidate; Republican volunteers started the day with 300 Trump stickers, Flocco said, and all of them were gone within a few hours.

But even though Flocco is a committed Republican, he hopes “whoever wins does the best for us,” he said. He’s not the one who has to live with the consequences of this election: “I tell my kids: I’ll be dead in 10, 15, 20 years.” Bucks County may be divided, he said, but “I’m worried about my kids, about my grandkids, [and] everyone is worried about the same thing.”

The average American spends about 40 minutes everyday checking Facebook. When they log on this afternoon, they’ll see a bright blue banner with their face below a call to action. Vote!, it says. It’s Election Day!

The election-themed message has become very popular on social media over the past eight years. Facebook and Google both have a call-to-action at the top of their site. Before you can listen to Spotify this morning, a recorded message from President Obama plays, reminding you to go to the polls. It’s all very civic and festive.

But many people don’t know that these social-media calls to action are both quite well-studied—and quite effective. Researchers believe that when Facebook tells people that their friends have voted, they are more likely to vote themselves. That’s why Tuesday’s banner includes your friends’ profile pictures above the message that “Joe Schmo, Jane Doe, Henry Thoreau, and 3 million other people have already voted.” When a team of researchers from Facebook and the University of California studied the peer effect of this call-out during the 2010 mid-term election, they found that simply seeing it made someone 0.39 percent more likely to vote. Because of the sheer number of people who did see it—the study examined some 61 million Americans—the authors concluded that Facebook had ultimately brought 340,000 more people to the polls.

In 2012, Facebook ran a different experiment on its users, testing whether changing the language of the “I Voted!” button made people more or less likely to click on it. I’ve never seen the published clinical results of that study, perhaps because of the infamous “mood manipulation” study scared Facebook off publishing the results of anything but the most benign user experiments. But two years ago, Micah Sifry had a great wrap-up of what it found at Mother Jones.

If this all seems like a lot of power for Facebook to wield… it is. One thing that this election has clarified is that that Facebook is—without a doubt—the most powerful company on the global media landscape, whether by fomenting fake news invented by teenage Macedonians or by sending 340,000 unlikely voters to the polls. That’s why, earlier this year, I spoke to the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain about how the United States could regulate Facebook.

So when you tell Facebook you’re voting today, know that you might be encouraging your friends to vote. But also know that you might be participating in more than one grand American experiment.

FAIRFAX, Va.—In Fairfax County, Virginia, normal is the new normal on Election Day.

When I arrived at the polling place at the County Government Center complex, I couldn’t tell who was voting and who was out for a stroll. Aside from the thickets of political signs, standard partisan volunteers, and green sample ballots outside the doors of the complex, election day here seems like business as usual. There are no long lines, no waits, and ample parking. Just like for any other civic business, people enter and exit the building, handle registration issues, and vote. No drama included.

For one of the most drama-filled election cycles in American history, that’s quite a departure from some of the worst predictions of violence and poll-intimidation today. But to Fairfax County Electoral Board Vice-Chairman Seth Stark, a smooth voting experience is the best way to get people involved in the political process.

“The fact that we’re getting so much positive feedback today is great,” Stark says. “If you’re voting for the first time, there has never been an election like this, with threats and talk of fraud. I feel bad that that’s the first election that young people are voting in. I didn’t know what to expect today, but I am confident that our office and the people that do this for a living are just superb at what they do. And we try to plan for every contingency and make sure that people’s votes are protected and the process is just as smooth as possible. And that’s part of how we get more people and young people involved.”

Stark attributes the county’s readiness to learning from challenges in the 2012 and 2013 elections. “In the general election in 2012, the turnout was extraordinary,” he notes, “and there were several precincts that had lines of two-and-a-half to three hours. And the Board of Supervisors for the county chartered a bipartisan commission to take a look at how the election process can be improved. I don’t want to give us the evil eye, because we’re open until 7:00 p.m., but we’ve had very few lines today and the lines are moving.”

Department of Justice monitors have been sent to the county—one of the largest in the state, and a key contributor to its recent Democratic shift—to observe elections today, and they’ll find a number of new voting tools in place. Reforms adopted by the county to improve the process include more phone lines and a move to paper-ballot optical scan machines, which are more accurate than touch screen-only ballots.

Though Fairfax County—as an extraordinarily wealthy suburb of D.C. and also home to a large university—is nobody’s idea of a tense swing county, and Virginia seems likely to vote for Clinton, Stark also points out that the turnout game is still political here. “Aside from the presidency, we have a very contested 10th Congressional District between Barbara Comstock, who’s a Republican, and LuAnn Bennett, who is a Democrat,” Stark says. After a razor-thin 2013 gubernatorial race that saw a recount and Fairfax heavily involved in counting provisional ballots, the county’s readiness could also play a key role in a key congressional race.

Donald J. Trump ended his campaign for the presidency right as he began—with a lie (or two).

The Republican nominee held his last two rallies at arenas in New Hampshire and Michigan, and in his inimitable fashion, Trump played up how large a crowd came out to see him. Appearing by phone on Fox and Friends, Trump proclaimed in the span of a few minutes that 21,000 people and then 28,000 were in attendance in Grand Rapids in the wee hours on Tuesday morning. He later said that 22,000 had turned out a couple hours earlier in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Aside from his claims growing by one-third while he was talking on the phone, Trump is almost certainly wrong on both accounts. The maximum capacity for the SNHU Arena in Manchester is under 12,000 people, according to its website. And the Detroit Free Press reported that the Grand Gallery in Grand Rapids holds just 4,200 people, citing the fire marshal.

This isn’t surprising coming from a candidate who has boasted of his powers of exaggeration. But it is a particularly fitting bookend for a campaign that began, as I wrote from Trump’s launch event last June, with the exact same fib:

Yes, the Trump campaign started with a flourish, and fittingly, it also began with a bald lie. “This is some group of people. Thousands,” he said, as he surveyed a modest audience that must have seemed several times larger in his mind. In truth, Trump strode past perhaps a couple hundred supporters wearing t-shirts emblazoned with his name and slogan (“Make America Great Again”), and holding signs distributed by his campaign.

Technically, the 2016 campaign doesn’t end for another few hours, and Trump wasn’t even done with with his apparent fabrications. He told the crowd in New Hampshire on Monday night that Tom Brady, the star quarterback of the New England Patriots, had called to tell Trump that he voted for him.

On Tuesday morning, however, Brady’s wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, said otherwise. When an Instagram commenter asked her if the news was true, Bundchen replied emphatically: “NO!”

In Pennsylvania, we’ve got an unusual Election Day situation: The Republican candidate for Senate hasn’t yet said if he'll vote for his party’s presidential nominee.

Pat Toomey, the Republican incumbent, is facing Katie McGinty, a former state environmental official and onetime candidate for governor. The guy has always been a bit of a hard sell for Pennsylvania. His first run at a Senate seat in 2005 ended during the primary, with a loss to veteran legislator Arlen Spector. He finally won in 2010—Spector had switched parties by then and gone down in flames during that year’s Democratic primary—but only by two percentage points. McGinty currently leads in the polls, with 45 percent of the vote to Toomey's 43 percent.

Adding to Toomey's woes is the man at the top of the Republican ticket. Donald Trump could win Pennsylvania, although it's unlikely, and there's still disagreement that his outsize presence will actually color voters' perception of down-ballot candidates. But Toomey has stepped carefully, largely declining to explicitly support or disavow Trump. As of this morning, he planned to cast his own ballot at 6:45 p.m. ET, about an hour before Pennsylvania's polls close—and he hasn't yet said who he'll pick.

McGinty, who voted this morning—almost certainly for Hillary Clinton—says her opponent's last-minute trip to the polls is nothing more than a dodge to avoid telling voters his true feelings.

FAIRFAX, Va.—Colleges and universities are often crucibles of political activity and theory. And Election Day on campuses often has a sports-like quality to it, as young theorists debate, college political associations jockey for position outside the polls, and students cast their ballots en masse—often for the first time. But has one of the most damaging and scandal-filled elections in recent memory, with two of the most disliked candidates of all time, damaged voting morale on campus? Students here at George Mason University gave me their perspectives.

A day after an on-campus rally by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine and Vice President Joe Biden, campus Democrats and liberals are active and energized on Election Day. Sarah Shay, a sophomore civil- and environmental-engineering major, says that she voted for Hillary Clinton “even though this election has been shrouded in negativity.” Shay says that “Clinton’s platform and her views line up with the way I see the United States going.” As part of a class taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, Shay and other classmates went to polling places across Fairfax County, which was assigned Department of Justice poll monitors on Monday, to get their own view of the electoral process for the first time.

Despite concerns with the flaws of both candidates, Shay is excited about casting a ballot for the first time. “Even though it’s controversial,” she says, “I’m still excited that I got to go vote for the first time and my voice was heard.”

Some students here are less enthusiastic. Terrence Northington, a senior electrical-engineering major, voted this morning, but says he was not happy about his choices for his first time voting. “I wanted to be enthusiastic,” Northington says, “but I couldn’t vote the way I wanted to. I wasn’t happy with my options, but I felt like I needed to in order to express my right to vote to avoid undesired outcomes.”

Sophomore Grant Pitarys passed out sample ballots on behalf of the George Mason College Republicans and nominee Donald Trump, but says he is a philosophical libertarian limited in his choices as well. “I felt like less of a person coming out of the polls,” Pitarys says, “and I felt like Trump was just thrown upon us. It was just a disappointment that the most outlandish election that could have happened, happened now. It’s just rough.”

Pitarys’s friend and fellow College Republican, Hunter Derensis, disagrees with Pitarys’s assessment, despite also sharing “radical libertarian” values. “I felt more excitement voting, because I disagree with the myth of voting as a magical, civic duty,” Derensis says. “I think it really just depends on picking the candidate you like best.” A history major, Derensis likened Trump’s nomination to those of William Jennings Bryan by Democrats in 1896 and Barry Goldwater by Republicans in 1964—campaigns that shaped politics for decades to come, win or lose. “They both went on to lose, so if Trump actually wins, that’ll be unprecedented, and that’s bigger in the big picture than Clinton being the first woman nominated,” Derensis says. Neither Pitarys nor Derensis found Gary Johnson’s nomination by the Libertarian Party compelling.

Despite the contrast in enthusiasm, Pitarys and Derensis anchored a bloc of Trump supporters outside of the George Mason polling location that was dwarfed by the presence of young Democrats. Derensis noted that although many of the sample ballots he’d passed out had been discarded, he still worked out of respect for his party. “I care about the Republican Party,” he says. “So I got out here at 9 a.m. and I’ll be here until 6 p.m., just doing my duty to the party.”

Donald Trump still refuses to say whether he’ll accept the results of the presidential election.

“We’ll see what happens,” the Republican nominee said on Tuesday after casting his ballot, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Trump had been asked whether he would concede if Clinton wins.

During the third and final presidential debate, Trump gave a similar answer when moderator Chris Wallace asked if he would commit to “accept the result of the election.” Trump dodged, saying: “I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now.” Later, Trump joked that he would accept the election outcome “if I win.”

Trump has suggested that the election may be rigged against him, whether as a result of unfavorable media coverage or unfair polls, a strategy that seems designed to lay the groundwork for an excuse if he loses and decides to not accept the election results.

Whatever happens, his refusal to clearly say he will accept the election results threatens to undermine the democratic process. As my colleague Peter Beinart put it: “Democracies require public legitimacy for their survival. When powerful actors withhold that legitimacy, the system crumbles.”

Henry Olsen argues in National Review that the battle between Clinton and Trump is quite a bit tighter than public-opinion surveys have captured.

It all comes down to what you think those who say they are undecided or voting for third-party candidates will do. We have years of evidence that even final polls overstate the number of people who actually vote for third parties by 33 to 50 percent; and this evidence shows that voters who back away from voting for third parties tend to break back to the party they normally favor. We also have years of evidence that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent where there is one. Both factors favor Trump over Clinton.

In the RealClearPolitics average, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson clocks in at 4.7 percent, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein at 1.9 percent, with roughly 5 percent undecided, unwilling to answer, or backing another candidate. That’s an unusually large chunk of voters, and if they broke decisively for Trump, they’d certainly be enough to change the race.

Olsen lays out his case in great detail. But even his optimistic assumptions serve only to narrow Clinton’s margin, and not to tip the race for Trump—their primary significance would be in delivering better down-ballot returns for the Republican Party. And his argument rests on the presumption that 2016 will follow past trends; that’s likely, of course, but this election has been replete with reminders that’s not necessarily the case.

It also assumes that the polls are accurately capturing the composition of the electorate. If, for example, there’s a chunk of Trump votes reluctant to tell pollsters of their support, or Trump backers who haven’t voted before, they may be underestimating his standing. That’s a much-discussed possibility, but there’s been little evidence of that so far. The last few days, though, have raised the potential for another source of significant error: Early voting in some states suggests a surge in Hispanic turnout that may not have been fully reflected in most polls, which struggle to accurately survey the group. If that’s the case today, as well, it would produce substantially wider margins for Clinton.

Olsen’s argument, then, is hardly dispositive. But it’s a useful reminder of how much remains uncertain, even though most votes may already have been cast.

Donald Trump just voted for himself.

He filed into his elementary-school polling station, P.S. 59 in midtown Manhattan, at approximately 11 a.m. ET with his wife, Melania.

Trump was clear about which candidate he planned to vote for when asked in an interview Tuesday morning with Fox & Friends. “Well, I’ve really worked on this hard,” he quipped, adding: “I’ve decided to vote for Trump.”

Before casting his ballot, Trump stopped to talk to a couple schoolchildren inside the school, greet an elderly woman with a walker, and respond to a reporter’s question about how the early returns are looking: “Everything is very good,” he said.

Trump has an unusual voting history. He’s been variously registered as a Republican, Democrat, and Independent, The Washington Post reported last year, and “hasn’t missed a vote” since he last joined the Republican Party before the 2012 election. But before that? Here’s the Post:

Curious about how often he actually voted, we reached out to New York-based political consulting firm Prime New York which has an updated list of voter behavior in the state. They provided The Post with Trump's history, back to his first registration [in 1987]. During that time, Trump voted in 18 of 28 general elections—missing seven during the third-year races. He's voted in two of the 11 primaries he could have—both of those in which he could have voted since 2010. He could have voted in two special elections, too, but didn't.

Nevertheless, it’s understandable that when you run for president yourself, you remember to vote.

Poll workers in Durham County, North Carolina, got an unpleasant surprise this morning: The computers they were planning to use for checking in voters were not functioning. I haven’t gotten through to the county board of elections yet, but the interim director told The News and Observer that the problem was with third-party software. Workers have shifted over to paper check-ins instead of computers. The glitch shouldn’t affect the way people vote, but it might slow down the check-in process.

I just visited several polling sites around Durham, and there didn’t seem to be any trouble. There weren’t even any lines. Volunteers watching the polls said there had been decent-sized queues when the polls opened, but by the time I got there, things were quiet. Lines are expected to pick up around lunchtime and in the late afternoon. Durham is a Democratic stronghold, so if voters don’t turn out to back Hillary Clinton, it could spell bad news for her in North Carolina.

PHILADELPHIA—This city is going to go for Hillary Clinton. It’s a Democratic stronghold with large populations of black and Latino voters. The big question here is not who will win, but by how much: Clinton needs strong turnout from minority voters, in particular, if she’s going to win the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.

More than any other group, Puerto Ricans are changing Pennsylvania’s voter demographics. They are by far the biggest Latino group in the state and have a large community here in Philly; as of 2010, Philadelphia County had the fifth-largest Puerto Rican population in the United States.

Tuesday morning was quiet in Philly’s northerly Fairhill neighborhood, which is predominantly Puerto Rican and African American. Workers at a local high-school polling station said they had seen 40 or 50 people come through during the first couple hours of voting. Outside, large, colorful posters listed instructions for voting in Spanish and English. Volunteers for the Clinton campaign wore bright orange shirts proclaiming “LiUNA!”—the Laborers’ International Union of North America—“for Hillary.” Nelson Santiago, a volunteer who said he has lived in Fairhill for 34 years, seemed to know most of the people coming by, giving them a hug or handshake before they headed into the polling station. Another volunteer, 22-year-old Joshua Ortiz, would then hand each person a quarter sheet showing the Democratic Party’s list of candidates and encouraging voters to “Push Button #1” when they got into the booth.

Santiago said the neighborhood is “heavily Clinton,” but some people probably won’t show up to the polls. “Everybody’s got their own mind,” he said. “They see the TV, see the battle [between the candidates], and they don’t want to vote.” He thinks it’s important to be involved, though, and he votes “no matter what.” The father of eight is currently unemployed, but he volunteers at the neighborhood school. While he wouldn’t name any particular issue that determined his vote—“I have too many,” he said—he got extremely animated talking about the quality of the local schools, which he says are overcrowded due to recent closings.

Different people had different reasons for choosing Clinton, but almost everyone was anti-Trump. One woman who has lived in Fairhill since 1961 said the Democratic presidential nominee is “very polite and well educated. Trump is stupid.” Another longtime resident, 55-year-old Edwin Gonzalez, said Trump “thinks he knows more than the majors,” which was concerning to him as a military veteran. Few people coming through the polling station seemed invested in down-ballot races; several people said they voted “straight for Clinton,” but didn’t know much about Katie McGinty, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, for example.

Francheska Quiles, 24, said she was voting for the first time, even though she was eligible in 2012. While she thought everyone would vote for Obama that year, the race is too close this time to sit it out, she said—“I have to do it.” It felt good to walk into the polling station, she said, especially because women haven’t always had the right to vote. And this year, she will cast her very first ballot for a woman president. “I don’t care about how racist [Trump] is,” she said. “I care about who they want to help.”

Santiago said he knows of a few people who favor Trump, but for the most part, the neighborhood seems to be for Clinton. A couple of blocks away from the polling station, a woman in a car shouted at her friend who was heading toward the school: “You fucking go for Trump and I will run you over!”

If you’ve followed Roger Stone at all over the years, you know that he is the die-hardiest of the die-hard right-wing stalwarts. His record in modern political activism goes back to the Nixon era, Through this past year he’s been all-out on the desirability and also inevitability of the Trump revolution. (In my recent cover story on the Clinton-Trump debates, I quote him as saying that Trump would “debate circles around” Hillary Clinton.)

He’s pictured above at in an informal moment at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. That’s him with bullhorn and round glasses, modeling a shirt with a Shephard Fairey-style painting of Bill Clinton with “RAPE” underneath. In profile at the left of this photo, you get a little profile view of Alex Jones, of Infowars fame.

I give this setup to provide context for Stone’s comment this morning poor-mouthing Trump’s chances in Nevada, blaming the campaign strategy there, and generally sounding anything-but-confident about the election prospects. His comments about Nevada come about two minutes into a Boston Herald radio interview, which you can listen to on SoundCloud here. “Frankly, Trump has run one of the worst campaigns in political history in the state.”  Not “Mister” Trump. Not “it’s going to be like Brexit, you just watch.” Not “these lying lame-stream media pundits are going to be eating crow.” Instead already assigning blame, hedging bets, wondering how this will look and sound starting tomorrow.

And New Hampshire? “Well, we’ll see how good Corey Lewandowski really is. The Clintons have a well-oiled political machine.”

I don’t know how things will turn out tonight. But listening to this, it sounds as if Roger Stone does.

Residents of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, are keeping tradition alive in the midst of a presidential election that has upended political norms.  

The tiny town has a long-standing tradition dating back to 1960 of casting votes in presidential elections and announcing the results around midnight.

Eight votes were tallied shortly after midnight on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton emerged the winner, securing four votes, while Donald Trump won only two. One voter opted for the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, and another, apparently nostalgic for elections past, wrote in the name of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

There’s a silver lining for Trump. Two other tiny New Hampshire towns—Hart’s Location and Millsfield—also voted in the early-morning hours, and Trump prevailed in the overall tally from all three towns with 32 votes to Clinton’s 25.

These early results are hardly predictive, but the quirky tradition nevertheless delivers a bit of good news for both candidates.

Today is a historic day by any measure. And a number of Americans are taking note of the first female presidential nominee in an unusual way: by visiting Susan B. Anthony’s grave and dotting her grave marker with “I Voted” stickers.

It’s an appropriate tribute for one of the most famous suffragists in U.S. history. Anthony was relentless in her fight for women’s right to vote. In 1872, she was arrested for trying to vote in a presidential election and fined $100. “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” she said.

Anthony died in Rochester, New York, 14 years before the right was granted in 1920. Years later, not only are women permitted to vote, but one may win the presidency.

The Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, where Anthony is buried, is aware of this significance of this moment. The cemetery usually closes at 5:30 p.m. ET on Tuesdays. But on Election Day, it’ll remain open until 9 p.m. ET. Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said the tribute has become a “rite of passage for many citizens” as they gather to vote Tuesday.

You can watch a live stream of the gravesite here.

Hillary Clinton voted this morning a little after 8 a.m. ET from a polling station in Chappaqua, New York, her adoptive hometown outside New York City.

It was hardly a private event. Surrounded by onlookers clicking their smartphone cameras in her direction, Clinton cast her ballot to cheers. Her husband, Bill Clinton, also voted inside the Douglas Grafflin Elementary School, the same place they voted during the New York primary.

“I know how much responsibility goes with this and so many people are counting on the outcome of this election,” Clinton told reporters outside the school shortly after voting. She added: “And I’ll do the very best I can if I’m fortunate enough to win today.”

The well-wishers surrounding Clinton could’ve probably spotted who she voted for. Presumably it was for herself.

It’s been 576 days since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy with a YouTube video and 511 days since Donald Trump rode down that escalator, and for many Americans it has felt like much longer. The end is here, at last—though many Americans on either side seem to feel that the result tonight won’t be just the culmination of the presidential campaign, but the end of the American way of life as they know it.

Sometime this evening, barring a freak occurrence like an Electoral College tie or a 2000-style recount, either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump will be president-elect. Most of the data point to a Clinton win. The Democrat has led polls consistently throughout the race except for a brief period immediately following the Republican National Convention. But in the last weeks of the campaign, the gap between them has narrowed, with Trump developing a narrow but real path to victory.

The eyes of the world will be on North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida tonight. In order to prevail, Trump will likely have to win every state that Republican Mitt Romney won in his losing effort four years ago, a group that includes the hotly contested Tar Heel State but not the other two, which both voted for Obama twice. From there, Trump has a few possibilities. He has to win Pennsylvania; or a combination of Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Maine’s second congressional district; or Iowa, Nevada, and some other unexpected state, like Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Virginia, and Wisconsin, all of which have polled in Clinton’s camp.

This election is a meeting between two candidates who are widely unpopular with the electorate. Clinton seemed, for years, inevitable as the nominee, despite her legions of critics and a stiff primary challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders. The nomination of the other candidate, Trump, seemed impossible, yet the businessman and entertainer managed to emerge from a crowded pack of experienced Republican politicians despite no experience and a passel of personally liabilities. For most intents and purposes, the vice-presidential nominees—Governor Mike Pence of Indiana for Trump and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia for Clinton—have not factored into the race.

More than most presidential elections, this contest pits two radically different approaches to government against each other. Clinton would become the first woman president, following 43 men, in 240 years of U.S. history, but in most other ways she epitomizes the status quo: A former senator and secretary of state, she is the wife of a former president and has promised on the stump to continue the legacy of her predecessor, Barack Obama. Opposing her is Trump, a man who represents not just a radical break with the current direction of the United States but even with his own party. Trump has overturned Republican doctrine on free trade, abandoned party efforts to reach out to Hispanics, African Americans, and women, and threatened to abandon long-held U.S. doctrine on defense and international alliances.

Yet the two candidates don’t just present two different philosophies of governance—they also represent two diametrically opposed styles of campaigning. Clinton has run a big campaign, with a huge fundraising operation, a large staff, and a sprawling organization in the states. Trump, by contrast, has run a highly unorthodox campaign. He waited for months to begin raising money, and still lags far behind his rival. He has run a lean operation, with minimal staff and frequent turnover, remaining personally involved in all decisions. Trump’s campaign poses a test not only to the status quo but to the conventional wisdom about how candidates run for office. It also remains unclear whether he has a serious data or get-out-the-vote operation; its absence could tip closely contested swing states.

The only reason Trump remains competitive is the strong support he enjoys among white people without college degrees, and particularly men. Following the 2012 election, many Republicans argued that their party could only survive by better courting minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, and women. Instead, Trump has led the party in the opposite direction, demonizing immigrants, insulting blacks, and alienating women. Trump’s fortunes are a test for whether a largely white party can still win an election, while Clinton’s fortunes will depend in large part on turnout among black and Hispanic voters.

Voters aren’t just choosing the next inhabitant of the White House—they’re also deciding who will control Congress. Most of the drama is on the Senate side, where Democrats need to win at least five seats—or four, good for a 50-50 tie, if a Clinton win installs her running mate Tim Kaine as the tiebreaking vote—to regain control. Most forecasters have the battle for control of the Senate race as a toss-up. Democrats’ best hopes for takeovers are in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. They are also seeking to knock out incumbents in Missouri, North Carolina, Indiana, and New Hampshire, but optimism for a pickup in Florida has mostly faded since Senator Marco Rubio reversed course and chose to run for reelection. Republicans are seeking to hold all of those seats and swipe a Democratic seat in Nevada, where Minority Leader Harry Reid is retiring.

For a time, Democrats also dreamt of winning the House. Today, the 38-seat swing necessary for that to happen seems unrealistic. It would require an unforeseen blue wave to achieve that margin, meaning that even if Democrats win the White House and Senate, a President Hillary Clinton would have to contend with a divided Congress. If Trump wins, by contrast, he would likely head to Washington with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. Whether that would translate into unity is a different question. Speaker Paul Ryan has backed Trump, but with notable hesitation, and some pro-Trump Republicans have suggested trying to topple the speaker.

Several state houses are up for grabs, and there are important gubernatorial elections in Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia. There are also hotly contested ballot measures around the country. The election could witness a huge shift in state policy on recreational marijuana use. Four states and the District of Columbia currently allow it, but voters in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada will decide on their own referenda Tuesday. (Legalization has depended on the federal government’s tacit tolerance, though how the next president might view such laws is unclear.) Several other states are considering medical-marijuana laws.

Despite the traditional drama of Election Day, more than 40 million people—around a third of the total popular vote in 2012—had already voted when the polls opened this morning. Meanwhile, the hardest work for either a President Clinton or a President Trump will come once the confetti has been swept up and the balloons dropped, as the new commander in chief confronts the task of governing and uniting the nation after one of the nastiest, most fractious campaigns in memory.