Danny Finkelstein discusses the alarming rise in White Patriot groups, since Barack Obama took office in 2008, in the run up to the US election. He argues that rather than showing an increase in racial division it might, in fact, suggest the opposite.

A single tear rolled down President Obama’s cheek during the final campaign speech of his political career.

On the eve of the presidential election, he returned to Iowa where 20,000 people heard him offer a tender account of his early days in Des Moines. It was in this city that a young senator’s unlikely bid for the White House was transformed into an unstoppable political movement.

It was his last speech in a campaign for re-election that will end today when 200 million Americans decide whether the first black US president deserves a second term.

Dixville Notch, a hamlet in New Hampshire, was the first to cast its vote early this morning. For the only time in its 72-year history of midnight voting, the result