Washington: After nearly two years of bitterness and rancor, America is on the way to electing its 45th president Tuesday, making Hillary Clinton the nation's first female commander in chief or choosing billionaire businessman Donald Trump, whose volatile campaign has upended US politics.
The winner will inherit an anxious nation, angry and distrustful of leaders in Washington. They'll preside over an economy that is improving but still leaving many behind, and a military less extended abroad than eight years ago, but grappling with new terror threats.
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Clinton enters Election Day with multiple paths to victory, while Trump must win most of the roughly dozen battleground states up in order to clinch 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate is also at stake, with Democrats needing to net four seats if Clinton wins the White House.
A tiny New Hampshire village cast the nation's first ballots at the stroke of midnight. Dixville Notch has had the honour of launching the voting, symbolically, since 1960.
Clay Smith was the first of the seven residents, including five men and two women, to vote as Tuesday's long awaited Election Day began. An eighth person voted by absentee ballot.
The tally was announced in a matter of minutes, the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton beat out her Republican rival Donald Trump, four to two.
Clinton vs. Trump
The two New Yorkers pounded each other relentlessly, each preaching that the other is wholly unqualified, as the race tightened in the final days after a persistent if elastic lead for Clinton, the Democrat, in preference polling. Those who dreamed of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic ticket or anyone but Trump for Republicans face their time of reckoning. Will they come home to their party, or just stay home?
Clinton, inheritor of Barack Obama's vaunted campaign apparatus and a skillful (and well-financed) organizer in her own right, fielded an impressive professional and volunteer operation. She had big names on the stage, loads of people tracking down supporters and getting them to early-voting places, committed and well-heeled interest groups behind her and lots of money for sustained advertising.
Trump's effort paled in comparison, seeming as unpolished and improvised as the candidate himself. What he had, that she didn't, were the pulse and the passion of huge crowds. Election Day should settle the question of which counted for more.
To those in Trump country, no boastful, stomach-turning video about women, no "lock-her-up" insult from the stage, no toxic tweet in the wee hours, could peel them away from the man whose crudities only made him more authentic in their eyes. To many of the Republicans who didn't come to the rallies - and to some of the lawmakers who faced the prospect of working with him in Washington - he was a disaster, a Republican Titanic sailing alongside Clinton's Democratic Lusitania. To the country at large, and much of the world, he polarized, repelled, entertained, shocked and fascinated.
Did that make Clinton less of a divisive figure?
Not to the Republicans who are already itching to impeach her if she wins.
