Trump wins battlegrounds Florida, Ohio, N.C.; Clinton hangs on

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump was the projected winner in the crucial battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio on Tuesday, widening an incredible but increasingly likely path to victory for the billionaire real-estate mogul and reality TV star.

Democrat Hillary Clinton was clinging to faint hopes as the election of the nation’s 45th president neared a frenzied conclusion.

By midnight, Trump had claimed more than 240 electoral votes to Clinton’s 215. The magic number is 270, and swing states still too close to call include Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), Wisconsin (10) and New Hampshire (4) .

Trump’s strong early showing brought angst to world financial markets, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling as much as 500 points in after-hours trading. Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network, said a Trump win would spark uncertainty and likely result in a steep fall in stock prices Wednesday.

Trump claimed early victories in Utah, Idaho, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Louisiana, Arkansas,Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana. Indiana is a historically red state and home to Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence.

“Thank you Indiana for making our state first on the board to vote to Make America Great Again! @realDonaldTrump,” Pence tweeted.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans were poised to maintain a solid majority.

Voters in several states had complained of long waits and, on occasion, supply disruptions and technical glitches, from reliably blue Massachusetts to the battleground states of Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Michigan.

In California, violence forced a lock-down of two polling places. Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan tweeted that voters in Azusa should seek alternate polling sites after a shooting affected two voting locations, including an elementary school. A gunman shot several people, killing one, and scattered would-be voters, police said.

Across the nation, surveys of voters leaving their polling places revealed an electorate more diverse, more educated and more upset than four years ago.

The surveys also showed that black and Hispanic voters continued to grow as a percentage of the electorate, while the white vote slipped slightly. Still, white voters made up 70% of the electorate and supported Trump 55%-37%, the surveys showed.

The surveys, from National Election Pool Survey by Edison Research, also showed nearly a quarter of Americans described themselves as “angry” about the way government is functioning.

Those people were at the core of Trump’s support. In 2012, about a fifth of voters described their feelings toward the Obama administration as “anger.”

The controversy over Trump’s comments about women notwithstanding, the “gender gap” appears to be comparable to what voters reported in both 2012 and 2008 — female voters were more likely to support Clinton and male voters were more likely to support Trump. And while men favored Trump, his numbers appeared to be little changed from Mitt Romney’s in 2012.