Note: This post will be updated throughout the day with exit polls, analysis, news and results for the presidential election and key U.S. senate races.

Update 11:45 p.m. PT: Donald Trump speaks at his campaign headquarters

Donald Trump has pledged to be a president "for all Americans."

The president-elect, addressing supporters at his victory party in New York City, asked that the nation to come together, and promised to "represent every citizen of our land."

He added that it was "time for America to bind the wounds of division" and "time for us to come together as one."

He also declared his administration will be a time of "national growth and renewal."

Trump said "America will no longer settle for anything but the best" and said that the nation will "dream big and bold and daring."

Trump said Hillary Clinton called him to congratulate him on his victory.

Trump said Wednesday that he "congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign."

He added that "we owe her a major debt of gratitude" for her service.

The gracious sentiment was a far cry from Trump's usually heated rhetoric about Clinton. He has suggested that she should go to jail and chants of "Lock her up!" were a staple at his campaign rallies.

--The Associated Press

Update 11:31 p.m. PT: The Associated Press has called the election in favor of Trump

Trump is expected to speak at his campaign headquarters soon.

Update 11:02 p.m. PT: Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta speaks at Clinton headquarters

"Everyone should head home, get some sleep, we will have more to say tomorrow," he tells supporters. In other words, don't expect Clinton to concede Tuesday.

Update 10:43 p.m. PT: The Associated Press calls Pennsylvania for Trump

If the projection holds, Trump is six electoral college votes away from winning the presidency.

Update 10:00 p.m. PT: Trump is on the verge of becoming president

"Why aren't I 50 points ahead, you might ask?" Hillary Clinton famously asked a roomful of union members back in September.

It was a reasonable question. Clinton was a former U.S. senator and secretary of state. She was widely reviled by Republicans, yes, but even with all the baggage she carried, she had the ideal C.V. to be president of the United States.

Her opponent, on the other hand, had never held elective office. Donald Trump was also a serial liar and shameless braggart. He was best known for pushing the absurd birther conspiracy theory. His knowledge of the issues facing the country appeared thin at best.

But the real-estate magnate and reality-TV star had tapped into something, something that politicians from both major parties had been ignoring for decades: the pain of white, working-class Americans.

Almost every pollster in the U.S. got this election wrong, some by a huge margin. The Huffington Post polling model on Monday gave Trump less than a 2 percent chance of winning the presidency. Even the heralded Nate Silver gave him only a 30 percent chance of winning.

"Never been as wrong on anything [in] my life," former Barack Obama chief campaign strategist David Plouffe tweeted late Tuesday night.

The new reigning political prognosticator in the country is liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. The Flint, Michigan, native, who won an Academy Award in 2003 for "Bowling for Columbine," said months ago that Trump would win the election.

"Donald J. Trump is going to win in November," he wrote on his website. "This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, 'cause you'll be saying them for the next four years: 'PRESIDENT TRUMP.'"

He expanded on his thinking in his quickie film "Michael Moore in TrumpLand":

"Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said, 'If you close these factories, as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back, and nobody is going to buy them.' It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives."

Moore continued:

"And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin ... If you live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant, because he's saying the things to people who are hurting. And it's why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them."

Moore was right. Working stiffs not just in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania but across the country came out and voted for Trump. His voters want to turn back globalization, technological advancement and racial diversity. They want America to be great again -- like it was in the 1950s, when it was the greatest manufacturing country in the world.

It never seemed likely this narrow appeal would work. Trump had to win every one of the core battleground states to secure the election. But it appears he has done it. He might end up also winning Michigan, Wisconsin and even Pennsylvania, which were all considered safe Democratic states.

The result: almost certainly a President Trump. And no one knows what that means. The Dow Jones industrial average is down 800 points in futures trading tonight, a clear sign of fear and panic among financial professionals.

Where does the country go from here? The Huffington Post, for one, is hoping for a fresh start. For months the left-leaning and aggressively anti-Trump news site has tacked an editor's note onto the end of every article about Trump. It called him a "serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist [and] misogynist."

The scathing note, the website declared tonight, is no more, an effort to achieve a "clean slate" for a new, completely unexpected United States of America.

Update 9:10 p.m. PT: Trump wins Iowa

Donald Trump is the projected winner of Iowa and has taken the lead in Pennsylvania. Trump is on the verge of becoming the president-elect.

Update 8:50 p.m. PT: Trump wins Georgia

Donald Trump is the projected winner of Georgia, putting him at 232 electoral-college votes -- and within hailing distance of the 270 he needs to win the presidency. Clinton, even with the big electoral-college vote haul from California, trails with 209.

Update 8:38 p.m. PT: Trump wins Florida

Donald Trump is the projected winner of Florida. This shock result -- the final pre-election polls in the swing state gave Hillary Clinton a narrow lead -- puts Trump on the brink of the most improbable electoral victory in U.S. history.

Update 8:02 p.m. PT: Trump is on the verge

Donald Trump is the projected winner in North Carolina, another blow to Hillary Clinton. With the swing state of Florida apparently on the verge of joining the Tar Heel State in the Trump column, and the Democratic states of Michigan and Wisconsin looking like they actually could go for the Republican nominee, Trump is now the smart data-geek's favorite to win the presidency.

The Clinton coalition is really problematic as far as the Electoral College goes. https://t.co/W5umtf2oY2 pic.twitter.com/pyllXZKrcx — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 9, 2016

Update 7:30 p.m. PT: Clinton scores much-needed wins

NBC News is projecting Hillary Clinton as the winner in Virginia and Colorado. These are officially battleground states, but for weeks Virginia and Colorado have been considered relatively safe for Clinton. The former secretary of state is not leading in any of the true toss-up states. It's increasingly looking like Michigan, which Trump is leading, will decide who becomes the next president.

Update 7:22 p.m. PT: Trump is now the favorite

Based on the states already called and those with a majority of votes counted, Donald Trump is now the favorite to win the presidency. The so-called "blue wall" -- states the Democrats have won for the past two decades -- is crumbling, with Michigan and Wisconsin seemingly poised to go to Trump.

With so many key states very close, there's a good chance a winner will not be declared tonight.

OK, change of plans: We're designating Michigan as "too close to call", resetting odds to 50/50 there. Clinton EC odds way down as a result. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 9, 2016

Update 7:10 p.m. PT: A possible Trump victory starts to sink in

No one likes uncertainty. Stock markets especially don't like it. And as the chances of Donald Trump being elected president spike, markets are beginning to react. You might want to put your next 401K report straight into the shredder.

Asian shares plummet as Donald Trump gains lead in electoral votes. https://t.co/YuULpH6nv7 — The Associated Press (@AP) November 9, 2016

Update 6:40 p.m. PT: Trump is rising

Donald Trump is clearly overperforming the polls in the battleground states and beyond. It's still early(ish), but whatever the final outcome, data guru Nate Silver will be able to crow. In fact, he already is. Huffington Post's Ryan Grim criticized him severely this week for giving Trump a 30 percent chance of winning. The HuffPo polling model put Clinton's chances at 99 percent. With Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and even Virginia looking good for Trump, Silver is looking like he was right -- or, more accurately, less wrong than other poll data-crunchers.

This doesn't seem like an election in which one candidate had a 99% chance of winning tbh — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 9, 2016

Update 6:00 p.m. PT: More expected wins for the candidates

Clinton is the projected winner of New York.

Trump is the projected winner of Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Update 5:43 p.m. PT: Republicans win Senate seat in Indiana

Republican Todd Young won the Senate seat in Indiana, easily defeating Democratic former Sen. Evan Bayh. This result was expected but it makes the path to a Senate majority harder for the Democrats.

Trump is the projected winner in the reliably Republican state of Arkansas.

Update 5:28 p.m. PT: Democrats flip Senate seat in Illinois

Rep. Tammy Duckworth has defeated Sen. Mark Kirk in Illinois, giving the Democrats an expected pick-up in their push to take control of the U.S. Senate. Dems need three or four more seats to flip, depending on the outcome of the presidential election.

With nearly half the vote in, Clinton is leading Trump in the reliably Republican state of Texas.

Update 5:20 p.m. PT: First Man? First Laddie?

The election is still very much up in the air, but former President Bill Clinton has been thinking about what his title should be if his wife becomes the U.S.' first female president.

Update 5:12 p.m. PT: Rubio wins re-election in Florida

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been re-elected, crushing Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, The Associated Press reports. Rubio, who earlier this year lost his home state in the GOP presidential primaries to Donald Trump, is dramatically outperforming Trump in Florida tonight.

Before Rubio decided at the 11th hour to run for re-election, Democrats had high hopes for nabbing his senate seat.

With more than 80 percent of the vote counted in the Sunshine State, Trump and Clinton are trading the lead in the presidential contest.

Update 5:02 p.m PT: More states called for Clinton, Trump

Clinton is the projected winner in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and Rhode Island.

Trump is the projected winner in Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Mississippi.

No surprises here. None of these are swing states. And D.C., of course, is reliably Democratic.

Update 4:50 p.m. PT: Florida is very close again

Hillary Clinton has inched into the lead in Florida with some 70 percent of the vote counted. She also has moved into the lead in North Carolina, with 28 percent of the vote counted.

Taking into account the states that are considered safe for Clinton and Donald Trump, Trump probably needs to win both Florida and North Carolina to end up in the White House.

Update 4:45 p.m. PT: Trump extends lead

Donald Trump leads in Florida with more than half the vote counted. He also leads in early results from another important swing state, North Carolina.

The Republican nominee is also the projected winner of the safe Republican state of South Carolina, moving him up to 33 electoral votes.

In the battle for the U.S. Senate, incumbent Republican from Ohio Rob Portman has won re-election.

Update 4:31 p.m. PT: Results now coming in!

The Associated Press and other news organizations project that Donald Trump has won Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, giving him 24 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton is the projected winner of Vermont's three electoral votes.

Georgia, usually a reliable Republican state but this year an unexpected swing state, is too close to call. Polls have also closed in Ohio, but it's also too close to call.

Voting hours are being extended in part of the key swing state of North Carolina due to problems with the voting machines.

This is only the beginning. News organizations will call a lot of states for Clinton and Trump tonight. They'll probably declare a president-elect. Someone might even give a concession speech. But even with all that, you should keep in mind that a lot of votes won't be counted until days or even weeks from now. And that these presidential votes held in abeyance -- provisional ballots, some absentee and other mail-in ballots -- historically favor the Democrat. From the Washington Post:

Consider that in the election returns reported by the New York Times on Nov. 8, 2012, (which we use for the initial election night counts), nearly 118 million ballots had been counted. In those, Obama led by nearly 2.8 million votes.

But by the time all the states had finished their official canvasses several weeks later, the total ballot count included more than 126 million votes -- an increase in 8 million votes since election night. And Obama's lead had grown to well over 4.8 million votes.

Update 2:50 p.m. PT: A primer on swing states and vote fraud

Tired of reading about the election? OK, then, The Oregonian's politics editor, Denis Theriault, will tell you about the swing-states results you really need to pay attention to. (Would it have killed Denis to wear a tie on camera? Well, it probably would have. This is Portland.)

We also have a short video explaining why vote fraud really isn't something you should be worried about, even though a Trump voter in Iowa has been caught trying to vote twice and another in Illinois apparently tried to vote on behalf of her deceased spouse.

Update 1:30 p.m. PT: Live by the tweet, die (laughing) by the tweet

When Donald Trump voted in New York earlier today, a photographer caught him apparently peeking at his wife's ballot. Yucksters on Twitter had a good time with the photo. Here a couple of examples:

Trump forced to keep his eye on his wife while voting. #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/drMcRo2pdV — David Schneider (@davidschneider) November 8, 2016

See the problem with @realDonaldTrump copying Melania’s ballot is that Melania copied hers from Michelle Obama. pic.twitter.com/b95l3oTo6L — Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) November 8, 2016

Less amusing on Twitter -- OK, not at all amusing -- was conservative polemicist Ann Coulter making clear who she thinks are the only real Americans. (It should be noted that by the Coulter standard, even Trump wouldn't be allowed to cast a ballot.)

If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide. — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 8, 2016

Update 12:10 p.m. PT, Nov. 8: Which blue state can Donald Trump flip?

Can Donald Trump flip Michigan, long considered a safe Democratic state, into the Republicans' column? TV pundits attempting to keep viewers glued to their sets are trying hard to make that sound plausible.

A much more likely get for Trump is North Carolina, a typically Republican state but one where Clinton has been strong throughout the general election. The final pre-election poll there concluded that the contest in the Tar Heel state was dead even. Also driving voters to the polls in N.C.: a very close and contentious Senate race between incumbent Republican Richard Burr and his Democratic opponent, Deborah Ross.

North Carolinians know their votes could decide not just the presidency but also the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Democrats need a net gain of four seats -- and the presidency -- to take control of Congress' upper chamber.

In the presidential race, Clinton has a distinct electoral-college advantage, with the safely Democratic states putting her within just a few votes of the 270 needed to win. But if Trump can snag the too-close-to-call battleground states of Florida and North Carolina, his path to victory opens up. And if he can unexpectedly turn a dark-blue state into a red one -- with the old-line industrial states of Michigan and Pennsylvania being the ones he's chiefly targeted -- then suddenly he's in the driver's seat.

The latter is a long shot, sure, but so was his becoming the Republican nominee. Trump appears convinced it's going to happen, and his most passionate supporters are also confident.

Which delights David Plouffe. Last Friday, Barack Obama's former chief campaign strategist tweeted that he was going to find a Clinton victory especially sweet because the polls had tightened.

You can take Plouffe's word for it that the election is a done deal, but the fact remains that Trump does have plausible routes to 270 electoral-college votes. They start, of course, with him winning all of the states that typically go Republican, which means beating back Clinton's challenges in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. Then he has to win the top-tier battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire. You can mix and match from there, such as swapping Wisconsin for Colorado, or Nevada for New Hampshire, and so on.

All of the scenarios you can come up with are a heavy lift for Trump, but they're doable.

More uncertain is the fate of the U.S. Senate.

It looks likely that Republican Sen. Mark Kirk will lose in Illinois, so there's one of the four seats Democrats need to take over. But getting three more could be difficult for the Dems.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have looked promising all year for the Democrats, but not as promising as they did a few weeks ago. In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is struggling to hold on against Democrat Katie McGinty. And in Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is fighting hard to stave off former Sen. Russ Feingold.

We've already mentioned the North Carolina race, where Burr is in trouble. Meanwhile, in Missouri, 35-year-old Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander has a real shot at taking down incumbent Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. In New Hampshire, Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan could oust the beleaguered incumbent, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who has flipped back and forth on her opinion of Trump. The Dems also still hold out some hope in Indiana.

Then there's Nevada, where former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto is looking to hold Harry Reid's seat for the Democrats.

Early on, the Democrats were hoping they'd pick up Sen. Marco Rubio's seat in Florida, but then after crashing out of the presidential primaries, Rubio changed his mind and decided to run for re-election. The Dems' candidate, Patrick Murphy, has proven weak -- he's widely seen as an empty suit. Rubio is expected to win relatively easily.

Published 8 a.m. PT, Nov. 8: Will it all be about Florida again?

"If we don't win [Florida], we're cooked."

That's the conclusion of a Donald Trump operative, and, unlike so much else about the Republican nominee's campaign, it's uncontroversial.

Trump must win Florida today.

It's entirely possible he could do it. The final polls show Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton neck-and-neck in the state that famously (or infamously) decided the super-close 2000 presidential election. "I had hoped that a week before the election, Trump would be losing Florida by a large enough margin that my vote wouldn't matter," anti-Trump Republican strategist Ana Navarro wrote Monday on CNN. "But darn it, my home state is too close to call. Florida could be the decisive state (again) as to who ultimately becomes the next president of the United States."

So instead of writing in her mother for president, as she wanted to do, the 44-year-old Navarro took a deep breath and did something she'd never done before: she voted for the Democrats' presidential candidate.

Whether Trump wins Florida -- and, indeed, whether he's elected president -- just might come down to how many Ana Navarros are out there in the country's swing states: registered Republicans who can't bring themselves to vote for their party's nominee. (Watch the Wieden+Kennedy video below.)

Trump has built a rabid following of supporters -- many of them long alienated from the electoral process -- with his anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade, joyously politically-incorrect campaign. But he's also driven away many traditional Republicans. There's no way to tell how many -- until the results come in tonight.

Because of this Trump-created schism in the GOP, Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren arguably would have cake-walked to the presidency if either of them had been the Democrats' nominee. But neither the vice president nor the Massachusetts senator threw their hat in the ring. Instead, the Dems nominated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has been reviled and defamed by the right for more than two decades. Thanks to this and her own missteps over the years (the best known of which during this campaign has been her email-server scandal), she is distrusted by a majority of Americans.

As a result, most of the other Republicans who ran in the presidential primaries probably would have been the favorite against her heading into Election Day. Some polls back in the spring showed Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio outdistancing her. Plus, the Democrats have held the White House for two terms, and there remains a lot of economic anxiety in the land. Historically speaking, 2016 was the Republicans' turn to win the presidency.

But Trump bested Kasich and Rubio and all the other "low energy" Republicans. And so Election Day has dawned with Clinton the favorite. Trump, with appeals to racists and misogynists, has obliterated all the norms of acceptable behavior for a presidential candidate and is even more distrusted than Clinton. Despite this, the real-estate magnate and reality-TV star is very much in contention.

Trump closed his campaign with the same downbeat, apocalyptic vision of the country that led him to proclaim at the Republican National Convention over the summer, "I alone can fix it."

"Two things get me the most," Trump said Monday in North Carolina. "Two numbers I don't -- it just doesn't make sense. Twenty-two suicides a day for our veterans. It doesn't make sense. And here's another one: America has lost 70,000 factories since China entered the World Trade Organization."

The Republican nominee blamed "Hillary and her failed establishment" for burying the country in "nothing but poverty, nothing but problems, nothing but losses," including endless foreign wars.

"The world hates us," he said. "The world hates us. We keep fighting and fighting. It's like a hose, the money just keeps pouring out. They've dragged us into foreign wars that have made us less safe, shipped our jobs and wealth all over the world."

The Clinton campaign, for its part, finally pivoted in the final hours from its relentless drumbeat about Trump's deficiencies as a candidate and a man.

"Is America dark and divisive or hopeful and inclusive?" she says in her closing TV ad, with soft piano music playing in the background. She goes on to insist she wants to be president for all Americans and that she will get up every day focused on making the economy "work for everyone, not just those at the top."

"I will work my heart out as president to make life better for you and your family," she says. "We won't always get it right, but you can count on this: I've never quit, and I never will."

Will that last pitch be enough to get her over the finish line? Will Trump's?

The Huffington Post believes Clinton will not just win but win big. Natalie Jackson, HuffPo's polling editor, projects she'll secure 323 electoral votes to Trump's 215. She says Trump "has essentially no path to an Electoral College victory." She also predicts the Democrats will take the Senate, just barely, "with 51 seats, or 50 seats and Tim Kaine as the vice presidential tie-breaker." (The North Carolina, New Hampshire, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Missouri Senate races are the key ones to watch.)

The vaunted data gurus over at FiveThirtyEight, however, give Trump a pretty decent shot at scoring an upset (and helping his party hold the Senate). They believe Trump has a 31 percent chance of victory. They have concluded that Florida and North Carolina are the most likely tipping points for the presidential election, but really Trump has to pretty much run the battleground-states board. It's not likely, but it certainly is possible.

Back at the beginning of October, Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson was doing well in his home state of New Mexico, prompting FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver to suggest the possibility that neither major-party candidate would reach the needed 270 electoral-college votes, sending the election to the House of Representatives:

A new poll puts @GovGaryJohnson at 24% in New Mexico, which makes this map plausible. Electoral College deadlock. https://t.co/EpKzUmfzUP pic.twitter.com/kgqpWlLuIK — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 2, 2016

That was a long time ago, and Johnson's support in New Mexico and beyond has collapsed. Still, it's probably going to be a nail-biting night for Trump and Clinton supporters. And the Senate, in particular, could very easily go either way.

-- Douglas Perry