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There are so many imponderables in so many different parts of the United States on the eve of the ballot that making a prediction about who will become the 45th president is a mug’s game.

If Clinton wins, it is highly likely she will enter office next January as the most mistrusted president in the country’s 240-year history. If Trump wins, he is certain to further inflame racial and ethnic passions at home and deepen anxiety about him almost everywhere else except in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran.

Most unusually for so late in the campaign, as many as 15 states were thought to still be in play on the eve of the election.

Could a surge in the turnout of Hispanic voters, who will overwhelmingly vote for Clinton, be enough to secure her a narrow victory in Florida, North Carolina or Colorado? Could Hispanic voters there and elsewhere compensate for the relatively tepid response of black voters to Clinton when compared with their mighty embrace of Obama during the past two elections?

The bigger problem for the U.S. and such countries as Canada who depend upon America for trade and defence, is that Trump’s candidacy has revealed drastically different views about this country’s future. It is sheer stupidity for the elites and the media in the U.S. and elsewhere to be so censorious of Trump’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach to public life or to dismiss all those who will vote for him as lunatics. They ignore at their peril the reality that he has exacerbated a sense of rage and exclusion that has almost every American voter in some kind of tizzy. Many of those voting for Trump are far from being deranged. They are sensible, hard-working folks who are fed up with Clinton and her ilk and genuinely feel their country has lost its way.