16 places that shaped the 2016 election: Orlando, Fla.

By Nov. 9, the votes will have been cast and counted, there will be a winner and a loser, and the country will begin a slow return to normal. Historians will have their say on the outcome, but all of us who have lived through this election will carry away indelible memories of a shocking year in American history: of a handful of ordinary people, swept up in the rush of history; of a series of moments on which the fate of the nation seemed, at least briefly, to turn; and of places on the map that became symbols of a divided nation. As we count down to Election Day, Yahoo News has identified 16 unforgettable people, moments and places.

ORLANDO, Fla. — After Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando this past June, John Henkle, a Nicaraguan-American banker who used to frequent Pulse, wasn’t sure how the community would react.

Henkle thought Orlando was a fairly gay friendly place for a smaller city, but still no Miami. He sometimes worried about exposing himself as gay in public, afraid that someone might get angry if he drew attention to his sexual orientation.

So he was touched when faith leaders — some from conservative Christian churches that had preached against homosexuality — joined vigils and memorials, expressing their grief at the attack on Pulse as an attack on the whole community.

“We’re sad, but at the same time it really opened people’s minds,” Henkle said on an October afternoon when he was visiting the shuttered Pulse site with a friend.

Rainbow flags labeled “Orlando Strong” were strung up along telephone poles on the avenue, and locals were still stopping to leave flowers, cards and teddy bears four months after the shooting.

“I saw how [Christian people] were changing their mind,” Henkle said. “They were coming here and doing some memorials. They had balloons, they had flowers. They don’t have it anymore, but that was kind of special. … I would have thought they would disapprove.”

Almost anyone you ask in this central Florida city agrees that the horrific attack — the country’s worst mass shooting in history — brought Orlando’s diverse population of evangelicals, Latinos, immigrants, black and gay people closer together and opened hearts and minds. But the unity forged by the tragedy has splintered over the most divisive and nasty election in modern times. And even the nightclub massacre, and the memory of the souls who perished there, have become pawns in the campaign.

Now, residents of the key swing state, many of whom are still grieving for this city, say they are just ready for the election to be over so they can pick up the pieces and move on.

The Pulse attack defied easy categorization, though that didn’t stop some people from trying. Mateen was a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent who was inspired by ISIS and angry at U.S. drone strikes against the terrorist group. But Mateen also frequented gay clubs and had made homophobic statements in the past, and some who knew him speculated he could have been gay himself. His shooting was both the deadliest violent act against LGBT people in U.S. history and the nation’s worst terrorist attack since 9/11.

In June, Clinton released a statement calling the shooting both an act of terror and one of hate against gays, while also mentioning the need to regulate guns. “This is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States and it reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets,” she said. Trump, meanwhile, called on Clinton to exit the race for not immediately using the words “Islamic terror” to describe the incident, and used the shooting to boost his plan to bar immigration from Muslim countries. Trump also tweeted that he “appreciated the congrats” for warning Americans that more terror incidents would occur in the country.

Both candidates visited Orlando that summer, as their campaigns fought over the swingiest area of the swing state — central Florida. Clinton visited the memorial, silently placing a bouquet of white flowers at the site, and met with family members of the victims. Omar Mateen’s father showed up at an Orlando Clinton rally in August, sitting right behind the candidate as she spoke. Her campaign disavowed his support and said he wasn’t invited to the event. In August, Trump stopped by an evangelical meeting of pastors in the city, including some who preached against homosexuality. Trump didn’t mention the Pulse shooting, but repeated a false claim that Obama and Clinton were the “founders of ISIS.” (Orlando is also home to Trump’s “spiritual adviser,” televangelist Paula White.)

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, a Clinton supporter, wondered whether his city’s tragedy would push the national election into a debate over gun control or terrorism — while trying to stay out of the politics himself. But the issue quickly faded from the national race. “The election has not really turned on the issue of gun control at all,” Dyer told Yahoo News. “What they’re debating now is what constitutes sexual assault.”

It’s unclear whether the attack will affect how people in Orlando end up voting come Election Day. Floridians tend to see the attack through whatever lens already made sense to their worldview, with liberals seeing it more as a gun control issue and conservatives seeing it as a terrorism one, according to Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida.

“The general public saw it as a horrible example of things run amok in America for whatever reason,” MacManus said. “Some people see it as guns and gay rights; others see it as a national security breach of the worst order. The bottom line is it was unsettling for everybody, but it drove people in different directions in terms of their candidate selection.”

The shooting hit Orlando’s Puerto Ricans — a key constituency who could end up deciding which candidate wins Nov. 8 — particularly hard. Nearly half of the Pulse victims were Puerto Rican and more than 90 percent of them were Latino. The island’s economic free fall has contributed to a huge influx of Puerto Ricans in the I-4 corridor of central Florida, which stretches from Tampa to Daytona Beach. Though there are now almost a million Puerto Ricans in Florida, the attack on Pulse was so large that it seemed like everyone knew someone who was affected in the community.

The two campaigns are vying for the I-4 corridor’s different constituencies, with Democrats hoping to benefit from the influx of Puerto Ricans, who tend to be more liberal than the state’s Cuban-Americans. Esteban Garces, state director of the Latino advocacy organization Mi Familia Vota, said his organization is noticing that Puerto Ricans are registering to vote because they are turned off by Trump’s comments about immigration, even though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and not affected by immigration laws. For his part, Trump is wooing central Florida’s Christian evangelicals and white blue-collar workers.

Rolando Casado, an assistant principal at Liberty High School near Kissimmee, straddles both communities as a Puerto Rican and a conservative Christian. His wife’s hairdresser was shot and killed in the Pulse attack. Casado, who grew up in Puerto Rico and then moved to the United States and joined the Navy decades ago, said he believes the unity he’s seen in Orlando after the attack has been a bright spot in the past few months, when he has been struggling with the tone of the election and what he sees as a lack of good choices. He, like others in the area, is faced with a barrage of negative advertising every day.

Casado, a lifelong Republican, is considering voting for Clinton due to his doubts about Trump’s character, though he is “struggling” with the decision because he believes Clinton also has character flaws. “I just wonder what happened to us? There were so many standup people,” he said sadly. “What went wrong? What happened? What was said or not that we ended up in this position?”

Others who were affected by the tragedy are more enthusiastically supporting their candidate. “To be honest with you, I’m more with the lady,” said Henkle, an independent voter. “I want her because it’s going to be history.” Henkle said he wants the constant negative chatter around the election to stop.

Dyer, Orlando’s mayor, perhaps summed it up best. “I’ll just be happy when it’s done,” he said. — By Liz Goodwin. Video produced by Kelli Hill.

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