But the long, unusual and often ugly 2016 presidential campaign has been about the country’s changing demographics and the shifting coalitions of the two major parties as much as about the two main candidates.
Trump expresses confidence while criticizing the media and public polls.
As the polls opened on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said he would do “very well” in the crucial battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, and acknowledged that after nearly a year and a half of campaigning the only thing left for him to do was wait and see.
“We’re going to win a lot of states,” Mr. Trump said in an early-morning interview on Fox News. “Who knows what happens ultimately?”
His voice raspy from one last after-midnight rally, Mr. Trump took some digs at Mrs. Clinton for enlisting celebrities to bolster her crowds and he assailed the news media for trying to keep him down. A self-proclaimed lover of polls, Mr. Trump said he no longer believes most of them.
“I do think a lot of the polls are purposely wrong,” he said. “I don’t even think they interview people, I think they just put out phony numbers.”
But there is one vote that the Republican nominee knew he could count on this Election Day.
“I’ve decided to vote for Trump,” Mr. Trump said.
But one of his former advisers has harsh words for his Nevada operation.
A political operative who helped Mr. Trump begin his 2016 presidential campaign nearly two years ago offered an unvarnished view of the Republican’s operation in Nevada, a state that is leaning toward Hillary Clinton.
“Frankly, Trump has run one of the worst campaigns in modern political history in the state,” said Roger Stone, a strategist who has advised Mr. Trump at different times over the last 30 years.
Nevada was once an important piece of Mr. Trump’s electoral puzzle. But Democrats and some Republicans have conceded that Mr. Trump was running behind there heading into Election Day.
Mr. Stone’s comments, in an interview on Boston Herald Radio, were an early bit of recrimination in an election cycle in which Mr. Trump’s organizational heft has been questioned.
Mr. Stone, who parted ways with the campaign in August 2015 over strategic differences, added that he saw Michigan, a state in which Democrats spent the final days sending Mrs. Clinton and President Obama, as a potential “surprise.”
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.
In a display of Election Day punctuality, Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, and his wife, Anne Holton, arrived at their polling place in Richmond before Virginia’s polls had opened. They cast their ballots just after 6 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.”
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.
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