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‘I Hate Him, but I Hate Democrats More’: Scenes From the U.S. Before the Election

Representative Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat seeking to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, campaigned at the House of Blues in Houston on Monday.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

New York Times journalists are reporting from around the country as candidates make their final pitches to the voters who will help reshape the United States for the next two years.

• Here’s a guide to how, when and where to vote on Tuesday.

• Make sense of the people and ideas shaping the election — and its aftermath — with our politics newsletter.

Storms are expected to hit much of the Eastern United States on Tuesday, which could depress turnout in some places.

A strong cold front could cause rain and wind anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, from the Florida Panhandle all the way up to Maine, said Tim Loftus, a data scientist and meteorologist at AccuWeather.

Multiple studies have shown that bad weather on Election Day can decrease turnout, which in turn tends to help Republicans, because the groups most likely to be deterred from voting are those who tend to vote Democratic.

Read more about the forecast, and what it could mean, here.

— Maggie Astor

MIAMI — Voting machine glitches and ballot omissions in Florida made headlines on Monday after they were identified by local elections officials and a civil rights advocacy group.

A federal judge in Gainesville ruled that Duval County, home to Jacksonville, should have posted sample ballots in Spanish at early polling stations, as mandated for 32 Florida counties by a court decision in September. Late Sunday, the advocacy group LatinoJustice PRLDEF sued after learning the samples had not been provided in Duval.

By then, it was too late to make a difference — no early polls were open on Monday — but the county elections supervisor, Mike Hogan, plans to post the ballots in precincts on Election Day, according to court documents.

In Miami-Dade County, some people waited in a long line during the final hours of early voting on Sunday after ballot-printing machines malfunctioned. At one point, preprinted ballots ran out and more had to be driven in from elsewhere, according to the county elections department. Volunteers offered voters pizza.

[Here are six types of misinformation to be aware of on Election Day.]

Long lines in the 2012 election caused national embarrassment for Miami-Dade, which has since redrawn voting precincts and equipped sites better to prepare for crowds. But the 2018 ballot is still some eight pages long.

Broward County is also on notice for Tuesday. State officials will monitor voting there after a court ruling in May that found the office of the county’s elections supervisor, Brenda Snipes, illegally destroyed some ballots from a 2016 congressional race.

— Patricia Mazzei

SAN ANTONIO — For all the talk about small government in Texas, it sure has a lot of them — 254 counties, the most of any state in the nation.

Representative Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso Democrat trying to thwart Senator Ted Cruz’s re-election, has been to all 254, as everyone in Texas knows by now. It’s a staple of his speeches and the focus of a new campaign ad, titled “On the Road Again” and featuring Willie Nelson.

But it’s hard for non-Texans to appreciate the vastness of such a feat. The state consumes more than 260,000 square miles, making it nearly twice the size of Germany. Most Texas politicians don’t even bother trying to visit all the counties because of the time, travel and cost, let alone the ratio between energy expended and votes won.

The congressman’s smallest town hall was probably the one in Dickens County, near Lubbock. The population of Dickens County: about 2,200. The population of Mr. O’Rourke’s event at J & M Caprock Cafe: about 8.

— Manny Fernandez

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Mike DeWine with President Trump in Cleveland on Monday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

CLEVELAND — Mike DeWine, the Republican nominee for governor in Ohio, has tried not to talk much about President Trump in the lead-up to the election.

Although Mr. Trump carried this bellwether state in 2016 by eight points — after former President Barack Obama won the state twice — Mr. DeWine has focused much more on local issues like the expansion of Medicaid and the work force than on the president. On Friday, he campaigned with the departing governor, John Kasich, a Republican who has been outspoken about his distaste for Mr. Trump.

But on Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeWine appeared together on stage at a rally here at the International Exposition Center, near the airport. (“I believe I’m going to win,” Mr. DeWine said in a brief interview on Sunday, by way of explanation. “And it would be important for me as governor to have a good relationship with the president.”)

Whether Mr. Trump’s presence would actually carry Mr. DeWine to victory over Richard Cordray, a Democrat, is unclear. Political analysts still view the governor’s race in Ohio as a tossup.

In the hours before the rally, a mostly tranquil crowd of Trump supporters, wearing red hats and all manner of Trump pins, trickled into the hall.

Sitting on the floor near the front was Jewel Kingsley, 35, sporting a lip ring and two pins with Mr. Trump’s face on them.

“I don’t like Mike DeWine,” she said, as a rally volunteer shooed a reporter away from the aisle. “But I’m going to vote for him.”

She described Mr. DeWine as the lesser of two evils. “I hate him,” she said, “but I hate Democrats more.”

As Mr. Trump began his remarks, he lamented that thousands of people were waiting outside the exposition center. “Should we invite them in?” he asked the large crowd inside, which yelled its approval.

The problem, he said, was that there was no more room inside.

As Mr. Trump spoke, an area at the back of the room, behind the press, was largely empty.

Sydney Ember and Michael Shear

IRVINE, Calif. — Before she became a congressional candidate in Orange County, Katie Porter was a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. The campus sits squarely in California’s 45th Congressional District, where Ms. Porter, a Democrat, is trying to unseat Representative Mimi Walters, a Republican. But her link to the university does not mean everyone there is fired up to vote. In brief conversations with more than a dozen students Monday, just half said they were planning to cast a vote — and only one was registered in the district.

“We’re all busy, we’re focusing on classes and I’m not sure what kind of difference it makes,” said Shannon McCall, who is from northern San Diego but is unsure which congressional district she lives in.

Just miles away, volunteers at headquarters of both campaigns were working the phones and preparing to knock on doors. With polls showing that the race remains a tossup, all that matters is who shows up to vote.

“I thought we were only calling supporters,” said one volunteer for the Walters campaign, sounding confused. “I think I just gave a Democrat instructions on how to find his polling place.”

“That’s O.K.,” the woman sitting next to him said reassuringly, encouraging him to move quickly to the next call. “That’s called being a good citizen.”

— Jennifer Medina

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Senator Heidi Heitkamp talked to voters on Monday in Bismarck, N.D.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

BISMARCK, N.D. — With less than 48 hours to go, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, considered the most endangered red-state Democratic senator, is leaving it all in the middle of the road.

Ms. Heitkamp has been crisscrossing the plains and valleys of North Dakota on a rigorous five-rally-a-day campaign push that began Thursday. She is using what’s left of her hoarse voice to sell voters on her brand of centrist politics and warn against the partisanship her challenger, Representative Kevin Cramer, has embraced.

“I believe in my heart this is the single most important election of my lifetime,” Ms. Heitkamp told supporters gathered here on an icy Monday morning, “because it is a calibrating election.”

[In North Dakota, Native Americans have tried to turn a voter I.D. law to their advantage.]

Here in North Dakota, Ms. Heitkamp’s supporters proudly say, voters have traditionally eschewed demands for blind partisan adherence in favor of a careful individual vetting of candidates.

Are they certain that will remain true come Tuesday?

“Well,” one supporter said, “we certainly hope so.”

— Catie Edmonson

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Members of Mi Familia Vota looked for their next house to visit while canvassing a neighborhood in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

ORLANDO, Fla. — Nancy Batista is a 32-year-old Guatemalan immigrant with a file full of voters to contact and a message for President Trump.

“How many more things can we tolerate?” she said, canvassing with a half-dozen Latinos on a sleepy cul-de-sac. “We all feel like we have been targeted.”

Ms. Batista oversees the Florida operation for Mi Familia Vota, a Latino civic group that says it has registered some 30,000 new voters in the state this cycle, about half of them Puerto Ricans.

[Read more: Who are we talking about when we talk about Latino voters?]

While Ms. Batista said the group takes care to avoid partisan advocacy for individual candidates when engaging with voters, it has not been subtle about its feelings toward Mr. Trump. Most recently, it released an advertisement featuring a dramatization of Mr. Trump slapping Latinos across the face. Its title, “Trumpadas,” is a play on the Spanish word “trompada,” which is a punch.

“We are very anxious,” Yadhira Barrios, 39, a canvass organizer, said in Spanish, after a mostly unsuccessful door-knocking swing.

But “good work,” she added, “is never in vain.”

— Matt Flegenheimer

Handshakes. Rallies. A “tax ax.” The New York Times has 16 photographers fanned out across the country covering the end of the campaign for the midterm elections. Keep up with the latest images here.

LAS VEGAS — Nearly three hundred members of the Culinary Workers Union gathered at headquarters over coffee, granola and breakfast burritos Monday to kick off their election eve canvass, the penultimate push after months of grueling door-knocking across the state on behalf of two Democrats: Jacky Rosen, who is running for Senate, and Steve Sisolak, who is running for governor.

“We vote, we win! We vote, we win,” the members chanted repeatedly throughout the kickoff event, which featured Ms. Rosen and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat elected in 2016 with union help.

“I’m running to repeal and replace Dean Heller,” quipped Ms. Rosen, cribbing a popular political slogan used by Republicans. Her campaign has hammered the incumbent senator, Dean Heller, a Republican, over his vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“I’m excited, really excited, and a little nervous,” she told reporters. She avoided commenting on the national stakes of the Senate race in Nevada. “I’m not a pundit, and we’ll leave that to the pollsters. But I believe we’re going to win.”

— Jose A. Del Real

LOWELL, Ind. — Predictions of a Democratic wave are hard to find in northern Indiana. At a get-out-the-vote rally in a barn here this past weekend, hundreds of Republicans celebrated over brats and cornbread.

“The blue wave everyone is talking about will be the tears of the Democrats,” said Mark Paul John, a painter who describes himself as a “freedom artist.”

“The Democrats, they are not listening,” he said as he displayed a painting of soldiers he had given police officers in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot by an officer. “They are just complaining.”

Adam Sedia, 34, a lawyer, said the crowd was larger than at the same event two years ago.

“A lot of people want to keep the momentum going,” he said, one foot up on a hay bale. “I’d like to see more justices like Justices Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh.”

Republican confidence was also high outside Indianapolis, at the final stop on Sunday night of the state G.O.P.’s bus tour. David Klingerman, 72, a retired contractor, said he “wasn’t feeling” a blue wave. “I think we’ll hold steady,” he said.

— Elizabeth Dias

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Stacey Abrams was introduced by Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State at a rally in Savannah, Ga., on Monday.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

TUCKER, Ga. — “Will you give me a hug like you kind of like me?” Stacey Abrams asked a child.

“Tell me your name,” the Democratic nominee for Georgia governor said to person after person.

“Do you think I’m going to share?” she said with a grin after a Nothing Bundt Cakes employee asked how many forks she wanted for the lemon and white chocolate confections. “That’s so cute.”

Clear away the weekend’s high-wattage rallies and blizzard of advertisements, and you’ll find that most candidates spent the final days of their campaigns practicing the very personal art of retail politicking, which has always been about more than a simple handshake.

It is also a blend of anecdote-summoning, child-noticing, clothing-complimenting, conversation-starting, conversation-ending and, in 2018, selfie-taking.

“Your goal is to make contact with any voter that’s open to making contact with you,” said Steve Dettelbach, a candidate for Ohio attorney general. “You put your hand out to somebody and the vast majority of people will shake your hand.”

Even seasoned politicians acknowledge that glad-handing can be something of an acquired skill — for the wooer and the wooed.

“I talk to everyone, but you can usually see micro-signals with people who do not want strangers coming up to them while they’re eating,” Ms. Abrams said with a chuckle. “I’m an introvert by nature, so I know what to look for.”

Mr. Dettelbach was more blunt about the challenge: “It’s not a normal thing to engage total strangers.”

Most candidates will shake more hands at Tuesday’s election watch parties. That will bring another test: remembering the names of people from campaign stops long ago.

— Alan Blinder and Sydney Ember

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Senator Claire McCaskill on Monday.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Locked in an extremely tight Senate race here, Josh Hawley has not been shy about comparing his Democratic opponent, Senator Claire McCaskill, to Hillary Clinton.

“I’ve got to say, the longer I listen to Senator McCaskill, the more she reminds me of the person she wanted to be president,” he said Monday morning at a rally here in the state capital. “You know, Senator McCaskill has been in politics for a lifetime. I am 38. She has been running for office just about as long as I have been alive, just like Hillary.”

The line was a winner, drawing a soft chorus of boos. But that’s not where the comparisons stop. Mr. Hawley has pulled himself close to Mr. Trump, and as the candidate jetted around the state, the two men were all but rhyming.

“They have never accepted that the election was legitimate,” he said of Democrats. “They have never accepted that Donald Trump was elected president.”

Mr. Hawley talked through the reaction to Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, warned of insecurity at the border, and even trotted out one of Mr. Trump’s signature lines. “I say to Senator McCaskill, tomorrow we are going to say to her, ‘You are fired,’” he said.

— Nicholas Fandos

WASHINGTON — Super PACs and party organizations with money left in the bank used the final days before the election to make a few last bets.

In the first four days of November, these outside groups disclosed nearly $8.5 million in new spending to the Federal Election Commission, in races ranging from the most competitive Senate contests to House races that have seen little spending thus far.

The biggest investment of the weekend was $670,000 from Integrity NJ, a super PAC opposing Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who faced bribery and fraud charges that the Justice Department later dropped. The Senate races seen as likely to determine control of the chamber — Missouri, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Indiana — also drew significant spending.

But some money went to races that aren’t on the national radar. Michael Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, spent more than $400,000 on TV ads boosting Kendra Horn, a Democrat, in Oklahoma’s Fifth District, a race that saw its first significant super PAC spending during the last week of October. And Maine Liberty PAC, a group whose biggest donors come from Texas, Nevada and California, spent $225,000. The group has been supporting Eric Brakey’s Republican challenge to Maine’s independent senator, Angus King. Polls show Mr. King leading the race by double digits.

Even with Election Day less than 24 hours away, the spending continues. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending, $7.7 million in spending was reported on Election Day and the day before it in 2016.

— Rachel Shorey

Maggie Astor reported from New York. Alan Blinder reported from Tucker, Ga. Jose A. Del Real reported from Las Vegas. Elizabeth Dias reported from Lowell, Ind. Catie Edmondson reported from Bismarck, N.D. Sydney Ember reported from Cleveland. Nicholas Fandos reported from Jefferson City, Mo. Manny Fernandez reported from San Antonio, Tex. Matt Flegenheimer reported from Orlando, Fla. Lisa Lerer reported from Prescott, Ariz. Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami. Jennifer Medina reported from Irvine, Calif. Michael Shear reported from Cleveland. Rachel Shorey reported from Washington.

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