WASHINGTON — A presidential campaign marked by upheaval and rancor headed for its Election Day finale on Tuesday, as Americans decided whether to send Donald Trump back to the White House or elevate Kamala Harris to the Oval Office.

Voters faced a stark choice between candidates with drastically different temperaments and visions for the world’s largest economy and dominant military power.

Trump voted in Palm Beach, Florida, near his Mar-a-Lago club, and said afterward that he was feeling “very confident.”

“It looks like Republicans have shown up in force,” he told reporters, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap. He said he had not prepared a speech on the results — win or lose — saying, “I’m not a Democrat. I’m able to make a speech on very short notice.”

Harris, the Democratic vice president, did phone interviews with radio stations in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. She has promised to work across the aisle to tackle economic worries and other issues without radically departing from the course set by President Joe Biden.

Trump, the Republican former president, has vowed to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, impose sweeping tariffs on allies and foes alike, and stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

Harris and Trump entered Election Day focused on seven swing states, five of them carried by Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020: the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Arizona and Georgia. Nevada and North Carolina, which Democrats and Republicans respectively carried in the last two elections, also were closely contested.

The closeness of the race and the number of states in play raised the likelihood that, once again, a victor might not be known on election night.

In 2020, it took four days to declare a winner. Regardless, Trump has baselessly claimed that if he lost, it would be due to fraud. Harris’ campaign was preparing for him to try to declare victory before a winner is known on Tuesday night or to try to contest the result if she wins. Four years ago, Trump launched an effort to overturn the voters’ will that ended in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump said Tuesday that he had no plans to tell his supporters not to refrain from violence if Harris wins, because they “are not violent people.” Asked about accepting the race’s results either way, Trump said, “If it’s a fair election, I’d be the first one to acknowledge it.”

Harris voted by mail in her home state of California. She’ll have a watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington.

Each candidate would take the country into new terrain.

Harris, 60, would be the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as president. She also would be the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 36 years.

Trump, 78, would be the oldest president ever elected. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.

He survived one assassination attempt by millimeters at a July rally. Secret Service agents foiled a second attempt in September.

Trump’s winning would affirm that enough voters put aside warnings from many of Trump’s former aides or instead prioritized concerns about Biden and Harris’ stewardship of the economy or the U.S.-Mexico border.

It would all but ensure he avoids going to prison after being found guilty of his role in hiding hush-money payments to an adult film actress during his first run for president in 2016. His sentencing could occur this month. And upon taking office, Trump could end the federal investigation into his effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

The potential turbulence of a second Trump term has been magnified by his embrace of the Republican Party’s far right and his disregard for long-held democratic norms. Trump has used harsh rhetoric against Harris and other Democrats, calling them “demonic,” and has suggested military action against people he calls “enemies from within.”

Trump kept up the vitriol to the very end of campaigning. In his final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who led the House when it impeached him twice, a “crazy, horrible human being” and barely restrained himself from using a sexist slur.

“She’s a crooked person, she’s a bad person, evil,” Trump said. “She’s an evil, sick, crazy — oh no. It starts with a b, but I won’t say it. I want to say it.”

His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, followed Trump’s lead during his own rally in Atlanta, telling the crowd that “we are going to take out the trash in Washington, D.C., and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris.”

Harris, pointing to the warnings of Trump’s former aides, has labeled him a “fascist” and blamed Trump for putting women’s lives in danger by nominating three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. In the closing hours of the campaign, she tried to strike a more positive tone and went all of Monday without saying her Republican opponent’s name.