Into the night

President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts dueled to the finish over major battleground states as a bitterly fought campaign for the White House ended last night with an intense race to dissect the results after the polls closed.

While the ballots were still being tallied in several tightly contested states, there were waves of predictable returns. Kerry swept up most of New England, while Bush won across the South as millions of new voters helped boost turnout to record proportions.

Bush captured the Carolinas, although the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator John Edwards, had roots in both states. West Virginia, a once-Democratic stronghold that shifted Republican four years ago, fell in line again behind Bush, as did Virginia, a state Kerry had once made a target of heavy advertising. Bush also won Missouri.

Kerry won handily across much of the Northeast, winning statewide in Maine, capturing at least three of its four electoral votes. In Massachusetts, voters voiced overwhelming disapproval of Bush, two-thirds of them giving him a thumbs-down.

But after early exit polls suggested a sizable lead for Kerry in several battlegrounds, the actual returns indicated a much narrower divide, especially in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Hunkered down for an excruciating wait -- with shades of the razor-thin contest four years earlier -- Bush invited a small pool of reporters into the White House to put his upbeat mood on display before balloting stopped on the West Coast.

''I believe I will win, thank you very much," Bush cautiously predicted just before 10 p.m., surrounded by his family after dinner in the White House residence.

The Kerry camp kept vigil in Boston, keeping a wary eye on precinct-by-precinct tallies late into the night as Edwards flew into town for the planned victory celebration at Copley Square. Strategists in both campaigns furiously analyzed the data. Hours passed without conclusive results.

In Florida, which delivered the presidency to George W. Bush by 537 votes after a contested vote four years ago, problems counting absentee ballots threatened to delay knowledge of final results.

Some Florida counties were having trouble counting the ballots because the large turnout was overwhelming local officials' ability to process them. Mindy Fletcher, spokeswoman for the state Republican Party, said that the GOP had a partisan advantage of 130,000 voters among requests for absentee ballots, so Bush could end up doing better than initial returns in the Sunshine State.

''The most egregious example is Miami-Dade, whose supervisor told our local attorney that she will not finish counting [absentee ballots] until Thursday," Fletcher said in a statement.

She also said that registered Republicans who requested absentee ballots in Miami-Dade outnumbered registered Democrats by a two-to-one margin, which could result in 30,000 net votes for Bush waiting to be counted there.

The Miami-Dade County elections office could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and other election watchdogs said they were filing a lawsuit seeking a court order extending the deadline for absentee ballots to be counted from 7 p.m. yesterday to Nov. 13, the same day that military overseas ballots can be received, so long as they were postmarked by Nov. 2.

Thousands of voters in the Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties who requested ballots did not receive them, even though elections officials insisted they put them in the mail. Officials sent out replacements over the weekend, but the ACLU said that many were sent out too late for voters to fill them out and have them returned on time.

It was the first time in more than a generation that voters were asked to pick a president during war, and it offered the first real measure of the nationwide political impact of the war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism. Both sides threaded terrorism and the threat of another terrorist attack into their chief arguments for election. Into the final weeks, national security officials warned of a potential strike on the United States, a caution echoed by the release Friday of a videotaped appearance by the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden.

Voters described yesterday's contest as the most consequential election of their lifetimes.

''This is the most people I have ever seen in this precinct in my life,"' said Bill DeMora, executive director of the Ohio League of Conservation Voters and a ward leader in the Short North District in Columbus, as he surveyed the long lines at a senior housing development.

With thousands of lawyers and monitors standing watch at the polls, voters reported isolated glitches as the day wore on. Millions had voted ahead of time, but campaign strategists kept redirecting resources until balloting stopped, guided by precise exit data that tracked turnout patterns down to each neighborhood.

Waiting out the election in Boston, Kerry did television interviews via satellite throughout the afternoon. Bush turned away from the campaign trail toward the end, leaving it to aides to make last-minute moves in the ground game.

Haunted by the one-term legacy of his father after the first Gulf War, Bush, 58, had worked toward reelection almost from the moment he was inaugurated, assiduously courting conservative Republicans and the religious faithful while his campaign strategists built a massive get-out-the-vote operation.

On the line in yesterday's vote: A risky strategy, engineered by senior political Bush operative Karl Rove, that banked on huge turnout among Republican loyalists and paid less heed to swing voters and moderates.

Kerry, 60, who had aspired to the presidency since his youth, stuck to a more traditional playbook -- built through coalitions of minorities, labor unions, and liberal interest groups -- in an attempt to reach socially conservative Democrats and relied on massive turnout operations orchestrated by the unions and independent liberal groups.

Far more so than Bush, Kerry shifted strategies as circumstances changed over the course of the race, playing heavily on worries about the war in Iraq -- even though he had voted to authorize it -- especially as the campaign headed into the final furlong, beginning with the first debate.

Both candidates played to their core images -- Kerry as the experienced Vietnam veteran, Bush as the steely wartime commander. Both zeroed in on a handful of important states, a central swath of the country that included Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and Michigan.

Both Yale graduates, they downplayed their privileged backgrounds, sent their wives and daughters out onto the campaign trail, invoked history and patriotic fervor, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in a campaign that flooded the airwaves in battleground states.

But their core similarities were few, forcing voters to pick between two starkly different world views that stood on display, side-by-side, until the very end.

Asked to draw the bottom line in the race, Bush summed it up succinctly. ''The issue is, who do you trust," he said on the last day of his last political race. ''This is a campaign of trust: Who do you trust to secure this country, who do you trust to lead with firmness and steadfast resolution, protect the American people; who do you trust to adhere to the values, the values that most people agree with; and who do you trust to keep this economy growing?"

After days of marathon campaigning in the most contested states, Bush sounded a note of weary resignation before most of the polling had begun, telling reporters yesterday morning that he wished Kerry the best of luck.

''You know, he and I are in the exact same position," Bush said as he emerged from his polling station at the firehouse near his ranch in Crawford, Texas. ''We've given it our all, and I'm sure he is happy, like I am, that the campaign has come to a conclusion."

After a last-minute stop in the Ohio capital of Columbus, Bush hunkered down at the White House residence to await the results, his election party on hold down the street at the Ronald Reagan Building.

Kerry flew to Massachusetts at midday, casting his ballot at the State House under gray skies before lunch at the Union Oyster House. His campaign staff huddled at makeshift headquarters at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, steps from the platorms and scaffolding erected in front of the Boston Public Library in hopes of hosting the first presidential victory rally in the city in more than 40 years.

In a final campaign stop in La Crosse, Wis. Kerry made his final appeal, telling voters: ''We're going to take America to a better place."

Anne E. Kornblut can be reached at akornblut@globe.com.