The most divisive and unpredictable presidential race in modern memory reached its end Tuesday with long lines at polling sites across the nation, suggesting voters could push turnout to new levels in some places even as many decried the campaign’s harsh and bitter tones.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton delivered starkly different messages as they made their last public appeals.
In Michigan, the GOP nominee blasted his opponent as embodying Washington’s corrupt culture. In North Carolina, Clinton said the election would be “where we prove conclusively that, yes: love trumps hate.”
By noon Tuesday, voters across the country were making their choices. In North Hollywood, Calif., some voters brought beach chairs to stake out a place in line before dawn. At one polling station in Detroit, people waited up to 90 minutes to reach the ballot booth.
At Stonewall Middle School in Manassas, Va., nearly 170 people were lined up when voting began at 6 a.m.
“I’m a determined voter,” said 37 year-old Michael Barnes, an account executive for Freddie Mac who showed up at 5 a.m. and backed a straight Democratic ticket. “I’m feeling relieved that I’ve at least done my part.”
For Laurie Jarman, an office manager in Fairfax County, it was antipathy for Clinton that drove her vote.
“I don’t know that I trust him either, but I feel that Hillary will be worse,” said Jarman, 46, who arrived at Stonewall Middle School about half-an-hour after Barnes.
Even an early arrival at the polls in Virginia’s capital, Richmond, did not guarantee Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the first vote. He, his wife Anne Holton and his parents arrived at roughly 5:50 a.m. at The Hermitage, but the resident association’s 89-year old president, Minerva Turpin, beat them to it.
The Kaines, accompanied by the senator’s father Al and mother Kathy, showed their photo IDs to poll workers and received fill-in-the bubble ballots. They fed them into the voting machine and walked outside, where some of the men and women waiting in a long line outside broke into applause.
In a sign of how contentious the race has become, the crowd lined up to vote outside Manhattan’s P.S. 59 – just a few blocks from Trump Tower – booed Trump as he went in to vote for himself.
Trump was joined by his wife Melania and daughter Ivanka. Trump again refused to say for certain whether he would concede the race if TV networks and others call it for Clinton. “We’ll see what happens,” he said.
Asked about his sense of early returns, Trump responded, “Everything’s very good.”
Soon after entering the school, Trump purchased what appeared to be a baked good from young child selling them on site.
After voting in Richmond, Kaine said that if he and Clinton were “fortunate enough to win this evening,” they would work to heal the deep rifts in the country that this year’s race had exposed.
“In the tone of the things that we say, in the team that we put together, and the policies that we promote, we have to show that we want to govern for all, not just those who voted for us,” he said.
Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, cast their ballots at Douglas G. Grafflin Elementary in Chappaqua, N.Y., at 8 a.m. Just four hours earlier, they had arrived from an early-morning rally in North Carolina.
Clinton, who plans to spend much of the rest of the day at home before heading to a Manhattan hotel to await returns, was greeted by chants of “Madam President!” as she walked outside.
“It is the most humbling feeling because I know how much responsibility goes with this and so many people are counting on the outcome of this election, what it means for our country,” she told reporters, when asked what it felt like to cast her ballot. “And I’ll do the best I can if we’re fortunate enough to be elected.”
Asked by a reporter if she thought about her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who was born in the year before women gained the right to vote and who died in 2011, Clinton responded with a smile: “Oh, I did.”
Hundreds of miles away Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D – one of the Clintons’ closest friends and biggest boosters – cheerfully waited in line for an hour at Richmond City Library before casting his ballot at 8:20 a.m.
“Yeah, it was an hour wait, but the greatest hour of my life,” McAuliffe said. “You think of the history of this election. I believe we’re going to elect the first woman in the history of the United States of America. We’re going to have the first Virginian on the ticket, Tim Kaine, first time in 100 years. I can give an hour.”
The historic and unusual nature of the race continued to reverberated far from voting centers as well.
At the Rochester, N.Y. grave site of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who died in 1906 without getting the right to cast a vote, Mount Hope Cemetery officials extended its hours until 9 p.m. as people pasted “I Voted” stickers on her headstone.
Meanwhile, former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling – a Trump supporter who has vowed to challenge Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in 2018 – deleted a tweet in which he praised a T-shirt that advocates lynching reporters.
Posting a photo of the shirt – which reads: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required” – Schilling wrote, “Ok, so much awesome here.” Later he described it as “a joke” and “100% sarcasm.”
In Manassas, where there is both a sizable immigrant population and support for Trump, James Bowers, 72, said working-class Americans like himself have seen their personal liberties erode with a Democrat in the White House.
“These eight years are the worst eight years I’ve seen in my life,” Bowers said. “It’s become a dictatorship and if Hillary wins, she’ll continue that dictatorship.”
But 43 year-old Yesenia Luna, the daughter of an immigrant from El Salvador, said she voted for Clinton because “we have to be the difference for all the other Latinos in this country.”
In a sign of how close the race remains, Clinton closed her campaign with an energetic rally in Raleigh, accompanied by her husband and their daughter Chelsea. Singer Lady Gaga performed for an audience that nearly to a person raised hands when asked how many had voted early.
Meanwhile, Trump took the stage at his final pre-election rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning – capping a five-state final push that started in Florida on Monday morning and weaved though North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
“Today is our independence day. Today the American working class is going to strike back,” he told the late-night audience that gathered at a convention center to hear him speak.
Well before Trump was done speaking, a substantial portion of Trump’s crowd started making its way toward the exits.
In his remarks, the Republican nominee said it was “almost hard to believe” that Election Day had arrived, as he reflected back to the beginning of the Republican primary and the many candidates he faced and eventually defeated.
On Wall Street, markets built on Monday’s surge – the biggest single-day rise since March – amid polls suggesting Clinton’s nationwide lead was holding. The Dow was up solidly in midday trading.
FBI Director James B. Comey said Sunday that the FBI had found nothing to alter its months-old decision not to seek charges against the former secretary of state for her use of a private email server.
As Clinton and Trump remained at center stage Tuesday, the two men who have dominated Democratic politics for the last two decades – Barack Obama and Bill Clinton – were relegated to supportive roles.
Obama, who traveled to three states Monday to stump on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, journeyed to Fort Lesley J. McNair Tuesday morning to play basketball with friends – an Election Day ritual he observed in both 2008 and 2012.
Meanwhile, in White Plains, Bill Clinton told reporters he’s quite comfortable playing the role of political spouse.
“It’s felt that way for several years now,” he explained. “I’m good! I’ve had 15 years of practice.”
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Gearan reported from White Plains, N.Y.; Sullivan from New York, and Eilperin from Washington. The Washington Post’s Laura Vozzella in Richmond, Va., Antonio Olivo in Manassas, Va., and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.
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