Election results 2016: Donald Trump wins crucial Florida vote by a tiny margin confounding early Clinton confidence

Florida was not secured by the Latino vote as the Democrats expected

At a hotel on the edge of Miami airport, a dense crowd of Hispanic supporters of Hillary Clinton watched the returns dribble in from their own state with contained terror. It was a hundred people or so. Outside, the whole country was watching the state too. As much of the world was.

Few when they came into the shiny lobby and sipped cocktails under festive balloons though that it would end as it did. Their work of so many months reduced to ashes, Mr Trump was - hours of agony and sinking spirits later - projected the winner by some media sources. Never mind if the margin was likley to be small. The prize they had promised to help deliver to her was gone.

Florida has been advertised as a likely cliff-hanger, just as it has been on election nights for the past many years. Yet, the whispers from Democrats during the days before had evinced cautious confidence. Their ground-game to get out votes had been so intense. The Hispanic support was stronger than ever. Mr Trump would be seen off in the state that mattered so much.

The breath-holding in the EB Hotel - and occasional exhalations of excitement - began at 7.25pm when the numbers on the big screen showed Ms Clinton taking the lead for the first time in a state that has always absolutely crucial for both candidates from the start. When the sums are done, it will show that no state had more money spent on it by both campaigns than Florida.

Won by the barest of margins by President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, the state offered a huge 29 votes in the Electoral College on Tuesday night and the Democrats always knew that if Ms Clinton could win it, Mr Trump’s chances of winning the White House would be all but extinguished.

Losing Florida was not necessarily a death-knell for Ms Clinton who had other models for reaching the magic 270 Electoral College votes to declare victory nationally. But that assumed, of course, that she would hold her firewall elsewhere. As the night rolled on - would it ever be over? - that was starting to look shaky and anxiety settled on the hotel’s marble floors like a patina of dread

It was a night, as as it was also going to be, of dramatic see-sawing between the two candidates in the state. With nearly 90 per cent of the vote in Florida counted them both at 48.5 per cent. But thereafter, he appeared to be building a solid lead over his Democrat rival.

For the Trump campaign the job had been to run up the vote in the conservative stretches of the state, including the panhandle in the North. For Camp Clinton, the task was always to build overwhelming numbers in their traditional bastions - much smaller geophracially speaking that Trump’s Florida - in Dade-Miami and Broward Counties in the south.

The Latinos were meant to have helped her do that. However, as the night progressed, it seemed that while the Latinos had given her a lift, they had not produced the surge to the polls - and to the Democrat - that many had predicted. Her bigger problem perhaps - losing white voters who had supported Mr Obama to the other side.

Long before the Florida count was done, Hispanic officials with the Democratic Party in South Florida could not contain themselves at the airport hotel, taking a podium to declare that victory was around the cormer for Ms Clinton.

“We are here to say our voices count. Seventeen months working hard to get to this moment. Florida! Florida! Miami! I want to applause for you,” Leonarda Duran Buike, President of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida,” fairly yelled. “Juntos, somos was!”, which translated as, “together we are stronger, more or less the slogan of Ms Clinton’s national campaign.

It wasn’t long before it seemed that their exuberance had been premature. For an agonisingly long time, it seemed that six per cent of the Florida vote count was outstanding with Mr Trump holding a significant lead. At the hotel, supporters of Ms Clinton clung to the hope that returns from one mostly county - Broward - could close the gap at the last moment. But it wasn't to be.

To understand what transpired in Florida you need to look no further than 2000, when the entire nationa race went into a harrowing 36-day dispute between George W. Bush and Al Gore, because no one could figure out how it had voted. It eventually went as far as the US Supreme Count which denied Democrat calls for a state-wide recount. On that occasion it was faulty ballots in Palm Beach County and the famous hanging chads that caused the confusion. But only because it was so close. When it was all over, the country found out that Mr Bush had become the new president by winning the Sunshine State by a mere 537 votes.

Even in 2012, Mr Obama defeated Mitt Romney in Florida by an average of just six votes per precint. That is how it is in Florida. And this year the increase since last time of the Hispanic populatoin, particularly of Puerto Ricans around Orlando, did not apparenlty make the big difference that some had thought likely.

"We really believe we have lost Florida," a Clinton campaign official finally told The Independent, while none of the networks were daring to say so, doubtless wary of getting Florida wrong as some of them did in 2000. He then vanished back to Clinton HQ in Miami, forbidden to talk to the news media any more.

Because the campaign was right. The big trophy in the sun, the AP projected, was lost.