By Mark Z. Barabak

Los Angeles Times

Rendering their verdict after a caustic season of anger and political recrimination, voters poured into polling places across the country on Tuesday in a midterm contest offering the first electoral judgment on the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump.

Early results heartened both parties.

Republicans picked up a Senate seat in Indiana, with businessman and former state lawmaker Mike Braun — a staunch Trump supporter — defeating first-term incumbent Joe Donnelly. In Tennessee, GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn defeated the state’s former governor, moderate Democrat Phil Bredesen, to hang onto the seat of the retiring Republican incumbent, Bob Corker.

In West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III, a prime target in a state Trump carried by 40 percentage points, beat Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to win his second full term.

In the fight for control of the House, Democrats picked up seats in the Virginia suburbs and south Florida, but Republican Rep. Andy Barr hung on to defeat Democrat Amy McGrath — one of the party’s most highly touted challengers — in the Lexington, Ky., area.

Although Trump was not on the ballot, he loomed large on Tuesday —the way presidents historically have in midterm elections — and many voters seized the opportunity to make their feelings known.

About two-thirds of those interviewed in exit polling said the president was a major factor in their vote, with 40 percent of those saying they cast their ballots in opposition to Trump and 25 percent expressing support.

For Republicans such as Charles Cooke, who cast his ballot in McAllen, Texas, it was a chance to deliver a big thumbs-up for the kind of non-politician he said the country needs.

“The things that have happened in the past two years are good,” Cooke said outside the Fireman’s Pumphouse polling station in Fireman’s Park. “The jobs, the economy is better than ever, a lot of manufacturing, companies are coming back to the United States.”

Many, however, looked past the strong economy. Even though two-thirds of those interviewed said the economy was in good shape, according to the Associated Press exit poll, 6 in 10 said the country was nevertheless headed in the wrong direction — suggesting they weighed other factors apart from their pocketbook.

Arriving at his polling station in Fayetteville, Ga., Christy Jindra said he felt a little uneasy about his vote in the state’s fiercely fought gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp.

“I’d probably not vote for Abrams if Donald Trump wasn’t president,” the 54-year-old attorney said. “Quite frankly, the Republicans have got to be slapped down a bit.”

Jindra used to consider himself a conservative, but voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he didn’t think Trump was presidential material. His opinion has not changed.

“You don’t believe anything he says,” he said. “It’s horrible.”

For the most part, the election was going off with no major glitches.

There were reports nationwide of broken voting machines and confusion at polling places. But nothing out of the ordinary for election day, and many of the problems stemmed from unusually long lines, which pointed to a higher-than-usual turnout for a midterm election.

Weather also played a part. In portions of the Deep South storm-related blackouts, including one in Knox County, Tenn., left several polling places without electricity, forcing voters there to resort to paper ballots.

Contrary to Trump’s warnings of possible nefarious acts, elections officials did not report any widespread voter fraud or irregularities.

At stake Tuesday were control of the House, Senate and the governorship in 36 states.

The election culminated two years of anger and political agitation, which began virtually the moment Trump took office.

Protesters flooded the streets in nationwide demonstrations the first weekend after his swearing-in, forging an army of dissenters who swelled the ranks of Democratic candidates and volunteers and filled the party’s coffers with a flood of campaign cash.

Republicans responded by rallying fiercely behind the president, overcoming any qualms about his tweets and temperament to battle critics and fight the so-called Democratic resistance.

The result was a midterm campaign that consumed and convulsed the nation like few non-presidential elections have in recent times.

“A great deal is at stake,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who could be restored as House speaker, told reporters during a swing last month through Florida, a perennial political battleground. “Our fundamental belief in our Constitution. The great respect we should command for everyone in our community. Fairness.”

Republicans agreed, at least as far as the import of Tuesday’s contests.

“This election is a choice between Republican results and radical resistance,” Trump told supporters at a pre-election rally in Columbia, Mo. “It’s a choice between greatness and gridlock. It’s a choice between jobs and mobs.”

To a greater degree than usual, issues such as the robust economy, which stood to benefit Republicans, and expanding health care, a part of the Democratic platform, took a back seat to raw emotion.

The searing fight over Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation deepened antagonism on both sides. Domestic terrorist attacks, including the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a spate of mail bombs directed at Trump’s critics, including Clinton and former President Barack Obama, put the country on edge.

Trump heightened tensions in the final days of the campaign by focusing on the fraught issue of immigration and, in particular, a migrant caravan inching its way to the U.S.-Mexico border; it reminded both sides what they love and hate about the president.

But passion alone did not rule the election; so did the hard-and-fast realities of geography. The fight for control of the House and Senate amounted to separate and distinct contests.

In House races, the political terrain tilted heavily in Democrats’ favor, with the key battlegrounds sprinkled throughout cities and the nation’s suburbs, home to millions of female voters, college graduates, Latinos and other minorities at the vanguard of the Trump opposition.

The Senate map, by contrast, unfurled across Trump country: rural, mostly white, older and heavily conservative. Democrats were forced to defend 24 seats —10 of them in states the president won —compared with just nine for Republicans, only one of them for a state that Clinton won.

Even before the polls close, one thing seemed certain.

The country is more deeply split than it has been in years. A pre-election Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 90 percent of those surveyed believe that political division is a problem for the country. Tellingly, when asked whom they held responsible, most partisans blamed the other party.

Nothing done or said during the long, venomous campaign or in Tuesday’s results suggests attitudes will change any time soon.