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As of Wednesday evening, hours after Clinton called Trump to concede, the former secretary of state clung to a narrow lead in the popular vote, 47.7%-47.5%.

She had 59,755,284 votes, according to CNN's tally, with 92% of the expected vote counted. Trump had 59,535,522. That difference of 219,762 is razor-thin considering the nearly 120 million votes counted so far. The totals will continue to change as absentee votes trickle in.

It's a fascinating turn of events for Trump, who four years ago tweeted, "The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy," following Mitt Romney's loss in 2012.

If Clinton hangs on, she would become the first presidential candidate since Al Gore in 2000 to win the popular vote but lose the election. Trump, who clinched the nomination by securing 270 Electoral College votes, currently leads Clinton 290-228, though Michigan and New Hampshire have yet to be called.

Prior to Gore's defeat to George W. Bush in 2000, three other candidates -- Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland, all in the 19th century -- had won the popular vote and lost the election.

Entering Tuesday, with most polls showing Clinton with marginal but steady leads, Trump's chances of victory were seen as remote. The Electoral College map was considered favorable to Clinton, who was said to have several paths to the winning threshold of 270 electoral votes.

But Trump obliterated Clinton's firewall, picking off unexpected wins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as sweeping swing states like North Carolina, Florida and Ohio.

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hillary clinton lost the election but is winning the popular vote - cnnpolitics

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Hillary Clinton lost but is winning the popular vote

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As of Wednesday evening, hours after Clinton called Trump to concede, the former secretary of state clung to a narrow lead in the popular vote, 47.7%-47.5%. She had 59,755,284 votes, according to CNN's tally, with 92% of the expected vote counted. Trump had 59,535,522.

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Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.

The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump's unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.

The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration.

The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism.

In Mr. Trump, a thrice-married Manhattanite who lives in a marble-wrapped three-story penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, they found an improbable champion.

"The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer," Mr. Trump told supporters around 3 a.m. on Wednesday at a rally in New York City, just after Mrs. Clinton called to concede.

In a departure from a blistering campaign in which he repeatedly stoked division, Mr. Trump sought to do something he had conspicuously avoided as a candidate: Appeal for unity.

"Now it's time for America to bind the wounds of division," he said. "It is time for us to come together as one united people. It's time."

That, he added, "is so important to me."

He offered unusually warm words for Mrs. Clinton, who he has suggested should be in jail, saying she was owed "a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country."

Bolstered by Mr. Trump's strong showing, Republicansretained control of the Senate. Only one Republican-controlled seat, in Illinois, fell to Democrats early in the evening. And Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican, easily won re-election in a race that had been among the country's most competitive. A handful of other Republican incumbents facing difficult races were running better than expected.

Mr. Trump's win - stretching across the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania - seemed likely to set off financial jitters and immediate unease among international allies, many of which were startled when Mr. Trump in his campaign cast doubt on the necessity of America's military commitments abroad and its allegiance to international economic partnerships.

From the moment he entered the campaign, with a shocking set of claims that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals, Mr. Trump was widely underestimated as a candidate, first by his opponents for the Republican nomination and later by Mrs. Clinton, his Democratic rival. His rise was largely missed by polling organizations and data analysts. And an air of improbability trailed his campaign, to the detriment of those who dismissed his angry message, his improvisational style and his appeal to disillusioned voters.

He suggested remedies that raised questions of constitutionality, like a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

He seemed to embody the success and grandeur that so many of his followers felt was missing from their own lives - and from the country itself. And he scoffed at the poll-driven word-parsing ways of modern politics, calling them a waste of time and money. Instead, he relied on his gut.

At his victory party at the New York Hilton Midtown, where a raucous crowd indulged in a cash bar and wore hats bearing his ubiquitous campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," voters expressed gratification that their voices had, at last, been heard.

"He was talking to people who weren't being spoken to," said Joseph Gravagna, 37, a marketing company owner from Rockland County, N.Y. "That's how I knew he was going to win."

For Mrs. Clinton, the defeat signaled an astonishing end to a political dynasty that has colored Democratic politics for a generation. Eight years after losing to President Obama in the Democratic primary - and 16 years after leaving the White House for the United States Senate, as President Bill Clinton exited office - she had seemed positioned to carry on two legacies: her husband's and the president's.

Her shocking loss was a devastating turn for the sprawling world of Clinton aides and strategists who believed they had built an electoral machine that would swamp Mr. Trump's ragtag band of loyal operatives and family members, many of whom had no experience running a national campaign.

On Tuesday night, stricken Clinton aides who believed that Mr. Trump had no mathematical path to victory, anxiously paced the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center as states in which they were confident of victory, like Florida and North Carolina, either fell to Mr. Trump or seemed in danger of tipping his way.

Mrs. Clinton watched the grim results roll in from a suite at the nearby Peninsula Hotel, surrounded by her family, friends and advisers who had the day before celebrated her candidacy with a champagne toast on her campaign plane.

But over and over, Mrs. Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate were exposed. She failed to excite voters hungry for change. She struggled to build trust with Americans who were baffled by her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state. And she strained to make a persuasive case for herself as a champion of the economically downtrodden after delivering perfunctory paid speeches that earned her millions of dollars.

The returns Tuesday also amounted to a historic rebuke of the Democratic Party from the white blue-collar voters who had formed the party base from the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Mr. Clinton's. Yet Mrs. Clinton and her advisers had taken for granted that states like Michigan and Wisconsin would stick with a Democratic nominee, and that she could repeat Mr. Obama's strategy of mobilizing the party's ascendant liberal coalition rather than pursuing a more moderate course like her husband did 24 years ago.

But not until these voters were offered a Republican who ran as an unapologetic populist, railing against foreign trade deals and illegal immigration, did they move so drastically away from their ancestral political home.

To the surprise of many on the left, white voters who had helped elect the nation's first black president, appeared more reluctant to line up behind a white woman.

From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party's lean years, shifted to Mr. Trump's Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.

Mrs. Clinton's loss was especially crushing to millions who had cheered her march toward history as, they hoped, the nation's first female president. For supporters, the election often felt like a referendum on gender progress: an opportunity to elevate a woman to the nation's top job and to repudiate a man whose remarkably boorish behavior toward women had assumed center stage during much of the campaign.

Mr. Trump boasted, in a 2005 video released last month, about using his public profile to commit sexual assault. He suggested that female political rivals lacked a presidential "look." He ranked women on a scale of one to 10, even holding forth on the desirability of his own daughter - the kind of throwback male behavior that many in the country assumed would disqualify a candidate for high office.

On Tuesday, the public's verdict was rendered.

Uncertainty abounds as Mr. Trump prepares to take office. His campaign featured a shape-shifting list of policy proposals, often seeming to change hour to hour. His staff was in constant turmoil, with Mr. Trump's children serving critical campaign roles and a rotating cast of advisers alternately seeking access to Mr. Trump's ear, losing it and, often, regaining it, depending on the day.

Even Mr. Trump's full embrace of the Republican Party came exceedingly late in life, leaving members of both parties unsure about what he truly believes. He has donated heavily to both parties and has long described his politics as the transactional reality of a businessman.

Mr. Trump's dozens of business entanglements - many of them in foreign countries - will follow him into the Oval Office, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest. His refusal to release his tax returns, and his acknowledgment that he did not pay federal income taxes for years, has left the American people with considerable gaps in their understanding of the financial dealings.

But this they do know: Mr. Trump will thoroughly reimagine the tone, standards and expectations of the presidency, molding it in his own self-aggrandizing image.

He is set to take the oath of office on Jan. 20.

Correction:

An article on Wednesday about the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States carried an erroneous byline in some editions. The article was by Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro - not by Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin.

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Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment

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Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.

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He says that our country should be based on law and order. He argues that we as politicians need to stop being so politically correct. He talks about how the illegal immigrants are roaming free harming other citizens. America is far less safe since Obama has put Hillary Clinton into office. Donald tells all the republicans that he is the voice for them . In conclusion he just tells everyone that no one knows the system better than me.

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Here are the best moments from Donald Trump's one hour and 16 minute speech at the Republican National Convention.

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Highlights: Hillary Clinton's DNC Speech

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Highlights: Hillary Clinton's DNC Speech

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She starts out by accepting the nomination and how she is proud that is woman has chance to be president . Then she lists reasons why Donald trump is unfit for president like if he can't handle a tweet than he can't handle a nuclear weapon. She then proceeds to lists her reasons why Donald shouldn't be president. She made the point that Donald could not handle all the pressure and the decisions of being president. She added that even the little things matter and they should matter to the president. She was focused on personal Diggs.

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Highlights: Hillary Clinton's DNC speech

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Each president has had their ups and downs based on actions and choices they make or others make, the polls could have gone up or down. Further accusations of lewd behavior hit trump negatively. Wikileaks releases excerpts of hillaries paid speeches which doesn't help her. Johnson swings and misses with his comments on Syria, saying all the wrong things. Arrest warrants are issued Jill stein and again negatively affects her campaign. Although most are negative there are still some positive. One example is that trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the US.

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Poll Tracker, powered by RealClearPolitics, shows who's up and who's down in the 2016 race.

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Trump with attacks on accusers, 'rigged" system.

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Trump with attacks on accusers, 'rigged" system.

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Donald Trump and his vice pence dis agree on the intensity of the election. They also disagree on accepting the outcome of the election. Trump refuses allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman. He then later brings up that Clinton should be in jail for improper use of email sever.

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Trump ratchets up 'rigged election' claims, which Pence downplays | CNN Politics

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Donald Trump and his surrogates amplified their argument over the weekend that the election is "rigged," leaving the Republican nominee more isolated as top members of the GOP - including his own running mate - declared their faith in the political system.

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US election 2016: Presidential race goes down the drain. 

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US election 2016: Presidential race goes down the drain. 

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Before the second US presidential debate Donald trump held an press conference about Bill Clinton sexual history. In doing this he is trying to make hillaries campaign seem bad. Basically the this presidential election has come to who can the most dirt and the worst dirt on somebody to try to make that person look bad. They aren't focusing on the politics as much as they should.

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The second week of October is likely to be remembered as the moment when the 2016 presidential campaign went careening off the rails and spinning into the void.

Pundits and election wags love to talk about the so-called "October surprise" - a last-minute revelation that turns an election upside down. This October, the only surprise seems to be a day without surprises.

Here are just some of the highlights of a week that will likely cast a shadow over US politics for years to come.

Sunday night mud-wrestling

If there were any doubts about the direction the second US presidential debate was going to take on Sunday night, they were dispelled an hour before showtime, when Donald Trump held an impromptu press conference with women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault.

The striking thing is that while the former president's sexual history was broached by the Republican, it probably wasn't the most eye-popping, norm-breaking moment of the debate.

That, instead, came when Mr Trump said that Hillary Clinton feared his presidency because his election would lead to her imprisonment.

"Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse," writes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

In the days since the debate, Mr Trump has only increased the voltage. Where once he used to downplay his crowd's "lock her up" chants, now he eggs them on.

"She has to go to jail," he said at a Pennsylvania rally.

Gone is any semblance of moderation or talk of pivot and restraint. It's red meat from here on out.

Follow Anthony on Twitter for more US election analysis.

While Mr Trump's embrace of "lock her up" rhetoric received the lion's share of condemnation from the left and the right, that debate moment likely won't have the greatest impact on the final month of the campaign. That (dubious) honour goes to his assertion that his secretly recorded discussion of how he made unwelcome advances on women was "just talk".

Such a blanket denial has prompted a steady stream of women to come forward to assert that Mr Trump's actions do, in fact, reflect his candid words. Jessica Leeds, who accused Mr Trump of fondling her on a plane, said she practically jumped out of her skin when she heard Mr Trump deny any improper behaviour.

The Trump campaign has promised that it will release evidence that the accusers are fabricating their claims - and Mr Trump in several speeches has issued blanket denials. So far, however, the sum total of evidence levelled against the growing list of women coming forward is a discussion of the mobility of airline armrests, an insistence that Mr Trump wouldn't have enough private time with the women in question to do anything untoward and, most amazingly, Mr Trump's own assertion that one of the women wasn't attractive enough to catch his eye.

"Believe me, she would not be my first choice," he said at a North Carolina rally on Friday.

Believe me, that line isn't going to win him any votes.

Hacked to pieces

You'd be hard-pressed to notice over the din of the travelling circus the Trump campaign has become, but the Clinton team also spent the week weathering a scandal of its own. Thanks to the release by Wikileaks of emails possibly acquired by Russian hackers, the public has been given an inside view of the Clinton campaign - and the picture it paints is often unflattering.

Campaign operatives obsess over messaging and even individual tweets, they mull over negative campaign tactics, try to resolve staff infighting and speculate on ways to inspire a liberal revolt within the Catholic Church.

The emails - assuming they are authentic - contain a full opposition-research dossier on primary opponent Bernie Sanders and staff-culled highlights of the most controversial portions of Mrs Clinton's speech to Wall Street banks that feature her pining for a hemispheric free-trade, open-borders zone.

They also show the campaign's at-times cosy relationship with mainstream journalists and television pundits - including evidence that former Democratic campaign operative (and current party head) Donna Brazile may have given the Clinton team a sneak peek at a question from a televised town hall forum during the Democratic primary.

It turns out presidential campaigns, like sausage, aren't things anyone wants to watch being made.

Trump v the world

Let's face it, email controversies aside, right now it's just Donald Trump's world and we're all living in it. Unfortunately for the Republican nominee, that particular world is one with enemies around every corner, conspiring to seize what is rightfully his.

After announcing that he was free of "shackles" in a tweet on Tuesday morning, Mr Trump has proceeded to pick fights with members of his own party's leadership, condemn what he sees as a hopelessly biased media and warn of an international cabal that aims to subvert American democracy.

He regularly tells his supporters that they should carefully monitor polling places in "other communities" for signs of malfeasance. His own website currently has a sign-up for volunteer "election observers".

"This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged," Mr Trump said at a rally in Florida on Thursday.

His campaign, he said, was at war with "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities".

Mr Trump's latest remarks have some commentators saying he's moved from anti-Semitic dog whistles to a fully fledged bullhorn.

"Whatever Trump is thinking or means, the white nationalists and neo-Nazis he's activated will hear his speech with glee because he's channeling textbook anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, with all the code words and emotional tenor," writes liberal blogger Josh Marshall. "These are the kinds of conspiratorial, revanchist fantasies that spur violence and attacks on the mundane ordinariness of democracy itself."

The one-two Obama punch

This week also featured two of the Democratic Party's biggest guns unloading their most pointed fusillades.

President Barack Obama, who has seen his approval ratings soar to their highest point in nearly four years, appears to be running out of pejoratives to describe the Republican nominee. On Wednesday he said Mr Trump's comments on women would disqualify him from employment at a 7-Eleven convenience store, let alone the presidency.

Perhaps more concerning for Republicans up and down the ballot, however, was Mr Obama's decision to try to tie the party as a whole to what could be Mr Trump's sinking electoral ship.

"They don't get credit for at the very last minute when, finally, the guy they nominated and supported is caught on tape saying things that no decent person would even think, much less say, much less brag about, much less act on," Mr Obama said in Ohio on Thursday.

"You can't wait until that finally happens and then say that's too much and then think somehow you're showing any kind of leadership and deserve to be elected to the United States Senate."

Those remarks stand in sharp contrast with the tone Mr Obama took at the Democratic National Convention in July, when he said that Mr Trump didn't embody Republican or conservative values.

Meanwhile, First Lady Michelle Obama launched her own attack on Mr Trump - and, if anything, it was more personal and more deadly. She has the advantage of being able to speak to Americans not as a politician but as an ordinary citizen (who happens to live in the White House, of course). And in this case, she was speaking to the nation as an outraged woman.

"This is not something we can sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election," she said of Mr Trump's surreptitiously recorded comments. "This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behaviour."

That her speech took place shortly before Mr Trump's free-form conspiracy rant, media condemnation and blanket denial of sexual assault allegations just made the contrast more stark.

Radioactive fallout

Rhetoric and media furore aside, what this election really boils down to is a numbers game. Who can marshal financial and manpower resources and who can't? Who's got the votes in key states, and who doesn't? Messaging and momentum matter, but in the end it's only important insofar as it puts ballots in the box and numbers on the board on election day.

According to current polling, it's been a miserable week for Donald Trump. His numbers are tanking nationally, as Hillary Clinton has stretched her lead from a virtual dead heat before the first debate to high single digits.

The story in swing states is equally troubling for the Republican. He still leads in Iowa, but the pivotal battlegrounds of Ohio, Florida and North Carolina are trending away from him. Then there are states that are normally safe for Republicans - Arizona, Georgia, Utah, Alaska and Indiana - that are showing signs of tightening.

A recent poll of Texas, which Republicans have carried in every presidential election since 1976 and hasn't elected a Democrat to state-wide office since 1994, shows Mr Trump only ahead by four points.

With less than a month until election day, time is running out for Mr Trump. Next week's presidential debate could be the last opportunity he has to shake up the race - but if the past two face-offs are any indication, they are more likely to cement Mrs Clinton's lead.

Pundits and prognosticators have been wrong about Mr Trump many times in the past. His primary campaign proved to be one long refutation of conventional wisdom. After this at-times-stomach-turning week, however, it's looking more and more like it would take an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the New York businessman to add the White House to his real estate empire.

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US presidential race goes down the drain

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The second week of October is likely to be remembered as the moment when the 2016 presidential campaign went careening off the rails and spinning into the void. Pundits and election wags love to talk about the so-called "October surprise" - a last-minute revelation that turns an election upside down.