By JONATHAN MARTIN, NATE COHN and ALAN RAPPEPORT
UPDATED 4:33 PM
The New York Times
Election Day is here at last. America is set to decide between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.
But the long, unusual and often ugly 2016 presidential campaign has been about the country’s changing demographics and the shifting coalitions of the two major parties as much as it has been about the two main candidates.
Trump campaign sues over Nevada voting.
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to have votes in Nevada impounded on the grounds that poll workers illegally extended early voting hours to accommodate people who were waiting in long lines.
Thousands of Hispanic voters lined up outside polling places to vote last Friday in Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas and has the state’s largest Hispanic population. Record turnout has raised fears among Republicans that they could lose the battleground state and Trump campaign officials have been complaining that the extension of hours in some locations is evidence that the election is rigged.
The lawsuit alleges that the people were allowed to vote illegally because they cast ballots after the published closing times at polling places.
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The campaign also sent a letter to Nevada’s secretary of state asking for an investigation into the allegations of “egregious violations.”
“The incidents that occurred on Friday night should be troubling to anyone who is interested in free and fair elections,” Charles Muñoz, Mr. Trump’s Nevada state director, said. “Voters who showed up after the scheduled closing times at selected locations were allowed to vote, while those who were not able to make it to other early voting sites by the posted closing times were denied the right to cast their ballots.”
A hearing was abruptly scheduled on Tuesday afternoon in Nevada to address the matter. A lawyer for the Trump campaign sought information about poll workers at certain locations and asked for records and logbooks from certain polling locations to be separated and preserved.
Judge Gloria Sturman denied the Trump campaign’s requests and appeared dumbfounded by the lawsuit.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “Why are we here?”
The Nevada secretary of state and the Clark County Registrar did not respond to requests for comment.
Clinton and Trump vote.
Parents held their children in the air to get a glimpse as Mrs. Clinton voted for herself in Chappaqua, N.Y., on Tuesday morning.
“It’s a humbling feeling,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Mr. Trump appeared to be in good spirits when he arrived at a Manhattan polling place on the Upper East Side just before 11 a.m. with his wife, Melania, to vote for himself.
He was met with a mix of cheers and boos as he left his motorcade and waved to pedestrians.
Inside Public School 59, Mr. Trump shook hands with other voters and offered high-fives to some children who came along with their parents.
The vice-presidential candidates also voted in the morning.
In a display of Election Day punctuality, Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, and his wife, Anne Holton, arrived at their polling place in Richmond, the capital, before the state’s polls had opened. They cast their ballots just after 6 a.m.
“We feel good,” Mr. Kaine told reporters afterward. “It’s kind of like we’ve done all we can do and now it’s in the hands of the voters. But we feel really comfortable about it.”
Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana did not have far to go to cast his ballot. Flanked by his wife, Karen, and his daughter, Charlotte, Mr. Pence walked across the street from the governor’s mansion to St. Thomas Aquinas Church shortly before noon.
Mr. Pence told reporters and supporters on hand that he was “humbled” to be able to vote for himself and Mr. Trump.
George W. Bush leaves the top of his ballot blank.
Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, did not vote for Donald J. Trump, a Bush spokesman said, making official their rejection of the Republican presidential nominee.
Mr. and Mrs. Bush “left the top blank and voted Republican down-ballot,” according to Freddy Ford, an aide to the former president.
Mr. Bush, his father and his younger brother Jeb, all indicated after the primary contest that they would not support Mr. Trump. The 43rd president has avoided commenting publicly on the campaign ever since, even as he obliquely criticized Mr. Trump’s brand of populism at a series of fund-raisers for Republican Senate candidates.
Bob Dole is the only former Republican nominee who supported Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
Long voting lines could have long-term consequences.
Early voters, urban voters and minority voters are all more likely to wait and wait. And that makes them less likely to vote in the future, according to new research. Minority voters are six times as likely as whites to wait longer than an hour to vote. Those disparities persist even within the same town or county, suggesting they don’t simply reflect the greater difficulty of putting on elections in populous cities.
CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The campaign has been about changing demographics and shifting coalitions as much as the candidates.
In a battle of the belts, it’s Sun vs. Rust. The changing nature of the presidential map can be deduced from where Mrs. Clinton went on Monday. She was assured enough of her prospects for winning Florida, a state that George W. Bush won twice, to not return to the biggest battleground of them all, but she held her second event in four days in Michigan, a state no Republican has won since 1988.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides express confidence that the results will go their way, in large part because of their optimism about Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia, but they are less bullish about their prospects in Michigan and states like Iowa and Ohio. It is a striking turnabout given how rooted Democrats once were in the heavily unionized Midwest and how much they struggled in the South and parts of the West.
But they have effectively swapped much of their working-class white base for the rising demographic of millennials, nonwhite voters and suburbanites clustered near cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington.
From watching these communities, it will become clear on Tuesday why Mrs. Clinton’s party enjoys a structural advantage in the Electoral College. But this election may also hasten the day when more of the heartland becomes out of reach, illustrating what Democrats lost as much as what they gained.
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Hillary Clinton, with former President Bill Clinton, greeted people outside the polling station in Chappaqua, N.Y., after they voted Tuesday morning. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Could it be Madam President? Mrs. Clinton could sweep away the gender barrier from the White House, yet her history-making potential has not received the attention that Mr. Obama’s candidacy did when he broke the presidential color line eight years ago.
But that is not to say her potential to be America’s first female president, along with the boorish comments that Mr. Trump has made about women, have not captured the attention of many voters. In every battleground state, the share of women as a percentage of the overall electorate has been higher in early voting than it was in the 2012 election.
Women, especially those with college degrees, have been galvanized this year. If they continue with their trend in the early vote and outperform their turnout from 2012, Mr. Trump could face a punishing defeat.
What is Trump’s way forward? Mr. Trump has one real path to the presidency: run up the score among white voters without a college degree enough to compensate for his losses among well-educated and nonwhite voters.
National surveys suggest Mr. Trump is poised to fare far better among white voters without a degree than Mr. Romney did four years ago, even if the same surveys show Mrs. Clinton in the lead. He leads that group by an average of 30 points in recent national surveys, compared with Mr. Romney’s 23-point edge in 2012.
If the polls and reporting are correct, Mr. Trump could make big gains in places that have been Democratic strongholds for generations, like Scranton, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; or Duluth, Minn.
Mr. Trump excelled in these areas in the Republican primary. The old bastions of the industrial left in Britain voted resoundingly to leave the European Union this year.
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People waited in line to vote in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in Florida on Tuesday. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
The Hispanic population, a sleeping giant, is now awake. The Hispanic turnout will be far higher than it was in 2012: The number of Hispanics who voted early in Florida this year is about the same as it was four years ago. The same story holds in heavily Hispanic areas across the country, whether the Latino neighborhoods of Las Vegas or the Texas counties along the Rio Grande.
Mrs. Clinton’s exact margin among Hispanic voters could prove just as important. She will probably win Latino voters by an even wider margin than Mr. Obama did, but polls have not always been clear on just how much she might beat Mr. Obama’s 2012 results. He won Latino voters by a margin of 44 percentage points, 71 to 27, according to exit polls.
The Latino vote has the best shot of deciding the election in Florida, where Hispanic voters represent a well-above-average share of the population. Mr. Trump does not have a credible path to the presidency without the state’s 29 electoral votes.
How much was spent for the Senate races? A great deal.
The nation’s Senate races end on Tuesday in a record whirlpool of cash. “Super PACs” and other outside groups spent more than $600 million on behalf of candidates this year, the bulk of it in roughly half a dozen competitive races, according to the Federal Election Commission.
The spenders’ choices in the election’s final week illuminated both last-minute dreams and worries. In Wisconsin, the state that reported the most increased spending for this week, groups dumped a startling $11 million in support of both Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican seeking re-election, and his challenger, former Senator Russ Feingold.
Additionally, a single Democratic super PAC’, Senate Majority Fund, outspent all Republican groups combined last week in an apparent rush to level the playing field after a last-minute barrage by the Republicans. “They move towards where there’s any last glimmer of hope,” said Josh Stewart of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit focusing on transparency in government.
In past years, last-minute spending in one state might spell decreased spending elsewhere. But the unprecedented amount of money raised by major Super PACs supporting both parties has allowed the dollars and ads to keep rolling across competitive states. For example, spending ticked up $7.5 million in Pennsylvania in the final week — this in a state that has seen over $100 million in outside Senate spending alone — making that the costliest Senate race in the nation. More than $5 million surged into each of Nevada, New Hampshire, Missouri and North Carolina this week.
Television viewers who are exhausted by the barrage of political ads may look at Oklahoma with envy. The state has seen only $2,000 in outside spending on the Senate race.