Hispanic voters in key states surged to cast their ballots in the final days of early voting this weekend, a demonstration of political power that lifted Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes and threatened to block Donald Trump's path to the White House.
In Florida, energised by the groundswell of Latino support and hoping to drive even more voters to the polls, Clinton visited a handful of immigrant communities on the weekend and rallied Democrats in a town filled with Hispanic and Caribbean migrants.
-"We are seeing tremendous momentum, large numbers of people turning out, breaking records,-" Clinton said in Pembroke Pines. Before taking the stage, she greeted voters at a heavily Cuban early voting center in West Miami and then stopped in at her storefront field office in Miami's Little Haiti.
Indeed, even as she fought a rear-guard action to defend a series of more heavily white states that appear to have grown more competitive, making trips to Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Clinton appeared to find a growing advantage in the more diverse presidential battlegrounds.
This long, unpredictable and often downright bizarre election was, in other words, ending along the lines it had been contested all along: with Americans sharply divided along demographic lines between the two candidates. But Democrats continued to hold the upper hand, thanks in part to the changing nature of the electorate in the most crucial states: Florida and a cluster of states in the South and West.
Trump also began the day in this state, rallying supporters in Tampa, where he recognised Hispanic supporters in his audience and declared -"the Cubans just endorsed me,-" citing an award he had been given by a group of Cuban-Americans. Without explaining what he meant, Trump said: -"The Hispanic vote is turning out to be much different than people thought.-"
Trump also stopped in North Carolina and then flew west for evening rallies in Colorado and Nevada. By holding events in those four increasingly diverse states, he was signaling a refusal to concede any ground to Clinton and rejecting the strategy of past presidential candidates who have fought within the confines of a narrower electoral map in the campaign's final hours. He even announced that he planned to add a stop in Minnesota, a Democratic bulwark.
But the evidence from polling and the early voting turnout seemed to indicate he was facing the possibility of sweeping losses in states with sizable Hispanic populations, most likely affected by the racially tinged language he has used since beginning his campaign more than 16 months ago.
-"The story of this election may be the mobilisation of the Hispanic vote,-" said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an anti-Trump Republican who has pleaded with his party to do more to win over Latinos.
Clinton can afford to lose Ohio and Iowa and even Michigan and still easily amass the 270 electoral votes needed for victory if she is able to secure the Southern and Western states that have tilted away from Republicans as they lost ground with nonwhites over the past decade: Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, as well as New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. And while she may not win every one of these diverse states, capturing most of them would be enough to deny Trump any path to the White House.
