'This is personal' Election result that will leave America still deeply divided

As the sun rose yesterday, there was something reassuringly familiar about the rituals that election day in America would bring: long queues of voters, candidates casting their own ballots, TV experts tapping their electoral map touchscreens and a steady flow of results from safe blue states and red states.

- David Smith

But something is different this time. The 2024 US presidential election has witnessed a late candidate switch, two lopsided debates, two assassination attempts, an intervention by the world's richest man, euphoria reminiscent of Barack Obama and rhetoric evocative of Adolf Hitler. It is a campaign marked by both violence and joy.

Its outcome will be equally groundbreaking. America might be about to elect Kamala Harris, the first female president in its 248-year history. Or it could hand the White House back to 78-year-old Donald Trump, the first former president with a criminal record as well as two impeachments.

Both sides are utterly convinced that their side must win, that defeat would represent the end of democracy, freedom and the American way of life. They are like two trains gathering speed as they hurtle towards each other. For nearly half the country the result will be devastating. They will have lost what the veteran journalist Carl Bernstein called a cold civil war.

That is in part because Trump has spent a decade sowing divisions of class and race. But this election has exposed a gender gulf two years after the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Democrats nominated a woman while Trump has embraced crude machismo and "bro" culture.

Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote: "It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump's swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy."