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Americans went to the polls to choose the next president of the United States, deciding whether Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain was better suited to guide the nation through an economic crisis at home and two wars abroad.
In voting booths in every corner of the land, the people were collectively writing the ending to a political saga that has been unfolding for nearly two years, during a tumultuous, uncertain period of American history in which record numbers of people expressed concerns that the country was heading down the wrong track.
Larger than usual turnout was reported at polling stations in a number of key states, and lengthy lines, hour-long waits and overflowing parking lots were not unusual. Some voting experts and campaign advisers predicted that some 130 million voters would cast ballots, which would be the highest percentage turnout in a century, and would shatter the previous record of 123.5 million people who cast ballots four years ago.
By noon Eastern time on Tuesday, some precincts in Chester County, Pa., were reporting that up to half of their registered voters had already cast ballots, according to Agnes L. O’Toole, the county’s deputy director of voter services. She said that some voters waited in line for as long as two hours.
“This is above and beyond an anomaly,” Ms. O’Toole said. “Our phones are off the wall.”
By 1 p.m, some 3,000 people had cast votes in Purcellville, Va. — more than the 2,900 people who voted there in the entire 2004 election, said Robert Lazaro, the town’s mayor.
The candidates made the long election season one day longer. Mr. Obama made a last campaign stop Tuesday in Indiana, a traditionally Republican state that he hopes to win, to visit a phone bank staffed by union members.
“I’d like to get your vote,” he told one man on the phone, according to a pool report. “Don’t be discouraged if there are some long lines.”
For his part, Mr. McCain set off for campaign stops in Colorado and New Mexico, two western states that voted for President Bush in 2004 and that he hopes to keep in the Republican column. At a rally in Grand Junction, Colo., surrounded by friends and family, he sounded an urgent call for help.
“Get out there and vote!” Mr. McCain said. “I need your help. Volunteer, knock on doors, get your neighbors to the polls, drag ’em there if you need to. We’re going to bring real change to Washington and we have to fight for it!
But first, the candidates voted.
Mr. Obama cast his ballot at 7:36 a.m. Central time at the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School in Chicago, accompanied by his wife, Michelle, who also voted, and by their daughters Sasha and Malia. “I noticed that Michelle took a long time though,” Mr. Obama said afterwards. “I had to check to see who she was voting for.”
Mr. McCain voted later in Phoenix, at 9:08 a.m. Mountain time, at the Albright United Methodist Church. He and his wife, Cindy, were greeted there by supporters with cheers of “Senator McCain!” and “Thank you, Senator! We love you!” Mr. McCain emerged with a sticker on his lapel that said, “I voted today.”
Mr. Obama’s running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, voted in Wilmington with his wife, Jill, and his 91-year-old mother, Jean Finnegan Biden. Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, voted in Wasilla with her husband, Todd. “Tomorrow I hope, I pray, I believe that I’ll be able to wake up as vice president-elect,” she told reporters there.
In tiny Dixville Notch, N.H., which casts its ballots just after midnight, Mr. Obama won 15 votes to Mr. McCain’s 6. The town usually votes Republican, and President Bush won the vote there in 2004.
There were some reports of voting problems. Virginia election officials said that three polling places opened late because of “human error.” At other polling places there, the paper ballots of voters who came in from the rain to vote with wet hands became soggy enough to foul the optical scanning machines that read the ballots. And at a polling place on the east side of Philadelphia, several voting machines were not working because they were too far from an available electrical outlet and no extension cord was available. But most areas reported things going smoothly.
Regardless of who wins on Tuesday, the election will make history. If Mr. Obama is elected, he will become the nation’s first African-American president. If Mr. McCain wins, his running mate will be the first woman elected vice president.
Presidential elections are really 51 separate contests waged in each state and the District of Columbia, and for Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, the day was all about trying to win enough of those states to secure the 270 electoral-college votes needed to win the presidency.
Looming over the race was the unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush, whose approval ratings are hovering at record lows after he started a war in Iraq that many Americans concluded was a mistake and presided during an economic collapse this fall that left millions of people worrying about their mortgages and retirement savings.
Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, premised his candidacy on change, arguing that he would turn the page on President Bush’s policies and make the country respected again at home and abroad. Mr. McCain, 72, a son and grandson of admirals who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years, ran as the candidate with the most experience to be commander-in-chief, but he also argued that he had a track record of bucking his own party and would bring change to Washington as well.
The two men offered starkly different policy proposals. Mr. Obama called for ending American involvement in the war in Iraq over a period of about 16 months, while Mr. McCain called for continuing the fight until victory was achieved. Mr. Obama wanted to roll back President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting taxes for the middle class; Mr. McCain wanted to extend the Bush tax cuts and add tax cuts for businesses. Mr. Obama wanted to use government money to expand health insurance for the uninsured, and to require coverage for all children, while Mr. McCain wanted to give individuals tax credits toward buying private insurance coverage.
In some areas, both men promised a break from the Bush administration, even if they differed on the details. Both agreed that global warming was real, and promised to take steps to reduce it; both pledged to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and both were outspoken in condemning torture after reports of waterboarding and other abuse of prisoners at the hands of American captors surfaced in recent years.
During the long, grueling campaign, Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed that a McCain presidency would effectively represent a third term for Mr. Bush. And while Mr. McCain has at times been a thorn in Mr. Bush’s side, as a presidential candidate he was proposing to continue enough of Mr. Bush’s policies, from tax cuts to the Iraq war, that the charge seemed to stick.
Mr. McCain, for his part, painted Mr. Obama as unprepared, noting that only four years ago he was still a member of the Illinois State Senate, and tried to sow doubts about him as still largely an unknown quantity.
Beyond the big issues, there were plenty of fleeting, insubstantial controversies as well. Mr. McCain mocked Mr. Obama as a substance-free celebrity, and Mr. Obama mocked Mr. McCain for being unable to remember how many homes he owned. At times the contest grew ugly, with Mr. McCain all but suggesting that Mr. Obama was a socialist for his tax-cut proposal, and Ms. Palin accusing Mr. Obama of “palling around with terrorists” for working sporadically with a former 1960s radical.
It was a presidential campaign that shattered all kinds of records, from the number of votes cast during the long, bitterly contested primary and caucus season to the huge amounts of money raised and spent on the general election after Mr. Obama withdrew his pledge to accept public financing of his campaign.
Each candidate went through lean periods when he was considered a long shot for his party’s nomination, only to prevail in the end. Mr. McCain overcame the implosion of his campaign in the summer 2007, which left him out of money and all but written off, by persevering and winning the New Hampshire primary. Mr. Obama was put on his path to the nomination by winning the Iowa caucuses, but the Democratic primary season became a long, drawn-out battle for delegates with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
It was a year when the running mates took on great importance. Mr. Obama, who was new to national politics, tapped a more experienced hand, Mr. Biden, as his running mate, picking someone with extensive foreign policy experience but a propensity for the occasional gaffe. Mr. McCain chose Ms. Palin, a first-term governor not widely known outside Alaska, arguing that her willingness to buck her party elders there made her a perfect fit for him. The choice galvanized social conservatives who had long been wary of McCain, but turned off some independents who came to view her as unprepared.
If both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were chosen by the parties in large part because of their positions on the Iraq war — Mr. Obama for opposing it from the beginning, and Mr. McCain for supporting the “surge” strategy that was later credited with reducing violence there — the election quickly turned to pocketbook issues. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline prices over the summer provoked outrage, and the worsening economy reached a crisis this fall when the nation’s financial institutions teetered on the brink of collapse and required a huge government bailout.
The family lives of the candidates did not pause for the campaign. One of Mr. McCain’s sons, Jimmy, a Marine, served a tour of duty in Iraq, and Ms. Palin and Mr. Biden each bid farewell to their own Iraq-bound sons. Ms. Palin announced on the day the Republican National Convention began that her daughter Bristol, 17, was pregnant and engaged to be married. Mr. Biden’s mother-in-law died last month, and late on Sunday, just before the election, Mr. Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him during his teenage years, died in Hawaii.
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