*Swing states catapult Trump to stunning victory
*Clinton congratulates President-Elect
*Republican Party controls Congress
Republican Donald Trump stunned the world on Tuesday by defeating heavily favoured Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, ending eight years of Democratic rule and sending the United States (U.S.) on a new, uncertain path.
He will be sworn in on January 20, 2017.
With the victory, Trump has claimed his place as America’s 45th president, an astonishing victory for the celebrity businessman and political novice who capitalised on voters’ economic anxieties, took advantage of racial tensions and overcame a string of sexual assault allegations on his way to the White House.
His triumph over Hillary Clinton will end eight years of Democratic dominance of the White House and threatens to undo major achievements of President Barack Obama.
Trump has pledged to act quickly to repeal Obama’s landmark health care law, revoke America’s nuclear agreement with Iran and rewrite important trade deals with other countries, particularly Mexico and Canada.
As he claimed victory, Trump urged Americans to “come together as one united people” after a deeply divisive campaign.
Clinton called her Republican rival to concede.
Trump, who spent much of the campaign urging his supporters on as they chanted “lock her up,” said the nation owed Clinton “a major debt of gratitude” for her years of public service.
The Republican blasted through Democrats’ longstanding firewall, carrying Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that hadn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since the 1980s. He needed to win nearly all of the competitive battleground states, and he did just that, claiming Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and others.
Global stock markets and U.S. stock futures plunged, reflecting investor concern over what a Trump presidency might mean for the economy and trade.
A New York real estate developer who lives in a sparkling Manhattan high-rise, Trump forged a striking connection with white, working class Americans who feel left behind in a changing economy and diversifying country.
He cast immigration, both from Latin America and the Middle East, as the root of the problems plaguing many Americans and tapped into fears of terrorism emanating at home and abroad.
Trump will take office with Congress fully under Republican control. GOP Senate candidates fended off Democratic challengers in key states, including North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin.
Republicans also maintained their grip on the House.
Senate control means Trump will have great leeway in appointing Supreme Court justices, which could mean a shift to the right that would last for decades.
Trump upended years of political convention on his way to the White House, leveling harshly personal insults on his rivals, deeming Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and vowing to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration to the U.S.
He never released his tax returns, breaking with decades of campaign tradition, and eschewed the kind of robust data and field efforts that helped Obama win two terms in the White House, relying instead on his large, free-wheeling rallies to energize supporters. His campaign was frequently in chaos, and he cycled through three campaign managers this year.
His final campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, touted the team’s accomplishments as the final results rolled in, writing on Twitter that “rally crowds matter” and “we expanded the map.”
Clinton spent months warning voters that Trump was unfit and unqualified to be president. But the former senator and secretary of state struggled to articulate a clear rationale for her own candidacy.
The mood at Clinton’s party grew bleak as the night wore out, with some supporters leaving, others crying and hugging each other. Top campaign aides stopped returning calls and texts, as Clinton and her family hunkered down in a luxury hotel watching the returns.
At 2 a.m., Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told the crowd to head home for the night with the race not officially called, but the Democrat’s fate all but certain.
Trump will inherit an anxious nation, deeply divided by economic and educational opportunities, race and culture.
Exit polls underscored the fractures: Women nationwide supported Clinton by a double-digit margin, while men were significantly more likely to back Trump. More than half of white voters backed the Republican, while nearly 9 in 10 blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics voted for the Democrat.
Doug Ratliff, a 67-year-old businessman from Richlands, Virginia, said Trump’s election was one of the happiest days of his life.
“This county has had no hope,” said Ratliff, who owns strip malls in an area badly beaten by the collapse of the coal industry. “Things will change. I know he’s not going to be perfect. But he’s got a heart. And he gives people hope.”
Trump has pledged to usher in a series of sweeping changes to U.S. foreign policy, including building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and suspending immigration from countries with terrorism ties. He’s also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and spoken of building a better relationship with Moscow, worrying some in his own party who fear he’ll go easy on Putin’s provocations.
The Republican Party’s tortured relationship with its nominee was evident right up to the end.
Former President George W. Bush and wife Laura Bush declined to back Trump, instead selecting “none of the above” when they voted for president, according to spokesman Freddy Ford.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, a reluctant Trump supporter, called the businessman earlier in the evening to congratulate him, according to a Ryan spokeswoman.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the American people “have chosen a new direction for our nation.”
Obama, who campaigned vigorously for Clinton throughout the fall and hoped his own rising popularity would lift her candidacy, was silent on Trump’s victory, but he is expected to invite him to the White House this week. It will be a potentially awkward meeting with the man who pushed false rumours that the president might have been born outside the United States.
Democrats, as well as some Republicans, expected Trump’s unconventional candidacy would damage down-ballot races and even flip some reliably red states in the presidential race. But Trump held on to Republican territory, including in Georgia and Utah, where Clinton’s campaign confidently invested resources.
Clinton asked voters to keep the White House in her party’s hands for a third straight term. She cast herself as heir to Obama’s legacy and pledged to make good on his unfinished agenda, including passing immigration legislation, tightening restrictions on guns and tweaking his health care law.
But she struggled throughout the race with persistent questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. Those troubles flared anew late in the race, when FBI Director James Comey announced a review of new emails from her tenure at the State Department. On Sunday, just two days before Election Day, Comey said there was nothing in the material to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.
A wealthy real-estate developer and former reality TV host, Trump rode a wave of anger toward Washington insiders to defeat Clinton, whose gold-plated establishment resume includes stints as a first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.
Trump collected just enough of the 270 state-by-state electoral votes needed to win a four-year term, taking battleground states where presidential elections are traditionally decided.
Victorious in a cliffhanger race that opinion polls had forecast was Clinton’s to win, Trump won avid support among a core base of white non-college educated workers with his promise to be the “greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
His win raises a host of questions for the U. S. at home and abroad.
He campaigned on a pledge to take the country on a more isolationist, protectionist “America First” path. He has vowed to impose a 35 per cent tariff on goods exported to the United States by U.S. companies that went abroad.
Both candidates, albeit Trump more than Clinton, had historically low popularity ratings in an election that many voters characterized as a choice between two unpleasant alternatives.
Trump, who at 70 will be the oldest first-term U.S. president, came out on top after a bitter and divisive campaign that focused largely on the character of the candidates and whether they could be trusted to serve as the country’s 45th president.
The presidency will be his first elected office, and it remains to be seen how he will work with Congress.
During the campaign Trump was the target of sharp disapproval, not just from Democrats but from many in his own party.
Television networks projected Republicans would retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives, where all 435 seats were up for grabs.
In the U.S. Senate, the party also put up an unexpectedly tough fight to protect its majority in the U.S. Senate.
Trump entered the race 17 months ago and survived a series of seemingly crippling blows, many of them self-inflicted, including the emergence in October of a 2005 video in which he boasted about making unwanted sexual advances on women.
He apologized but within days, several women emerged to say he had groped them, allegations he denied. He was judged the loser of all three presidential debates with Clinton.
During the campaign, Trump said he would make America great again through the force of his personality, negotiating skill and business acumen.
He proposed refusing entry to the United States of people from war-torn Middle Eastern countries, a modified version of an earlier proposed ban on Muslims.
His volatile nature and unorthodox proposals led to campaign feuds with a long list of people, including Muslims, the disabled, Republican U.S. Senator John McCain, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the family of a slain Muslim-American soldier, a Miss Universe winner and a federal judge of Mexican heritage.
Throughout his campaign – and especially in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July – Trump described a dark America that had been knocked to its knees by China, Mexico, Russia and Islamic State.
The American dream was dead, he said, smothered by malevolent business interests and corrupt politicians, and he alone could revive it.
He offered vague plans to win economic concessions from China, to build a wall on the southern U.S. border with Mexico to keep out undocumented immigrants and to pay for it with tax money sent home by migrants.
The Mexican peso plunged to its lowest-ever levels. The peso had become a touchstone for sentiment on the election as Trump threatened to rip up a free trade agreement with Mexico.
His triumph was a rebuke to President Barack Obama, a Democrat who spent weeks flying around the country to campaign against him.
Obama will hand over the office to Trump after serving the maximum eight years allowed by law.
Trump promises to push Congress to repeal Obama’s troubled healthcare plan and to reverse his Clean Power Plan.
He plans to create jobs by relying on U.S. fossil fuels such as oil and gas.
Trump’s victory marked a frustrating end to the presidential aspirations of Clinton, 69, who for the second time failed in her drive to be elected the first woman U.S. president.
In a posting on Twitter, Clinton acknowledged a battle that was unexpectedly tight given her edge in opinion polls going into Election Day.
“This team has so much to be proud of. Whatever happens tonight, thank you for everything,” she tweeted.
The wife of former President Bill Clinton and herself a former U.S. senator, she held a steady lead in many opinion polls for months.
Voters perceived in her a cautious and calculating candidate and an inability to personally connect with them.
Even though the FBI found no grounds for criminal charges after a probe into her use of a private email server rather than a government system while she was secretary of state, the issue allowed critics to raise doubts about her integrity.
Hacked emails also showed a cozy relationship between her State Department and donors to her family’s Clinton Foundation charity.
Trump seized on the emails to charge that Clinton represented a corrupt political system in Washington that had to be swept clean.
Trump’s national security ideas, opposed by most of the elite voices across the political spectrum, have simultaneously included promises to build up the U.S. military while at the same time avoiding foreign military entanglements.
He wants to rewrite international trade deals to reduce trade deficits. He has taken positions that raise the possibility of damaging relations with America’s most trusted allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
He has promised to warm relations with Russia that have chilled under Obama over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in the Syrian civil war and his seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?” he said at many rallies.
At his maiden speech on Wednesday, the President-elect praised Clinton and pledged to unite America.
Trump, joined by large family members, told a cheering crowd of supporters that `I just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us, it’s about us, on our victory and I congratulated her family on a very hard-fought campaign, I mean she fought very hard.
“Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time and we owe a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country, I know that very sincerely.
“Now, it’s time for Americans to bind the wounds of division and to get together.
“To all Republicans and Democrats and Independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.
“I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans and this is so important to me.
“For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which they were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great party.
“As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of diligence, of hardworking men and women, who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their families.”
He said it was a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs, who wanted and expected the American Government to serve the people.
He added that “working together, we must begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and remolding the American dream.”
The president-elect pledged to ensure that every single American got the opportunity to realise his or her fullest potential, as well as rebuild infrastructure.
According to him, millions of Americans would be engaged as his administration would rebuild infrastructure in the country.
“We will embark upon a project of national growth and renewal. I will harness the great talents of our people and we will call upon the best and brightest to leverage their tremendous talents for the benefit of all.
“We have a great economic plan. We would double our growth and have the strongest economy anywhere in the world. At the same time, we will get along with all of the nations willing to get along with us.
“We expect to have great relations. No dream is too big, no challenge is too great; nothing we want for our future is beyond our reach. America will no longer settle for anything less than the best.”
Trump, while assuring the international community of fair dealings under his administration, also challenged Americans to “reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big.
“I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America’s interest first, we will deal fairly with everyone, all people and all other nations.
“We will seek common growth, not hostility, partnership not conflict,” he said.
Vice President-elect, Mike Pence, had earlier addressed the cheering crowd after which he introduced Trump to the crowd.
Pence said “the American people have spoken and the American people have elected their new champion.
“America has elected a new president and it is almost hard for me to express the honour that I and my family feel that we will have the privilege to serve as the Vice President of the United States of America.
“I counted this moment deeply humbled, grateful to God for His amazing grace,” he said in the company of his wife and children.”
Trump, a businessman, made history as the first ever U.S. president without a military or government background.
According to media reports, Trump, who for months was not taken seriously by the Republican establishment, eventually overcame 16 other candidates vying for the conservative party’s presidential nod.
Analysts said even after officially accepting the Republican nomination in July, he struggled into the final weeks of the campaign to consolidate the conservative party’s base.
Attracted by his hostility to immigrants and trade, many of Trump’s core supporters are disaffected white independents, who compared to the entire U.S. population are older, less educated and disproportionately male.
Democrats accused him of bigotry toward Latinos, Muslims and other minorities.
During the campaign, Trump’s mostly unscripted comments angered military veterans, handicapped people and women.
Clinton was bidding to return to the White House, which she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, occupied from 1993-2001.
A long-running FBI investigation of Clinton’s handling of classified emails while serving as secretary of state from 2009-13 dogged her campaign.
