“A house divided against itself cannot stand…”

A cliché at times like this but none the less true. The 2016 presidential election wrecked havoc on the United States of America, creating divides which will likely take many years to heal.

While it didn’t start with the election, that was when the lines where clearly drawn. An estimated 60.2% of the voter eligible population turned out to vote leading up to November 8th. Of the 138.8 million ballots cast 65.8 million were cast for Hillary Rodham Clinton and 63 million were cast for Donald J. Trump – making Trump the fifth president ever to have lost the popular vote.  He won the electoral college vote on December 19th with 304 electorates; though 2016 broke the long standing 1808 record for faithless electors who voted against their pledged candidate ( 5 Democrats from WA and HI, 2 Republicans from TX, others rebelled and where replaced) and to compound the issue Trump went on to claim that Clinton received three million fraudulent votes which would be the largest voting scandal in US history.

All of this turbulence only heightened the tensions between the two camps, which were becoming steadily more and more entrenched, although by and large Americans didn’t seem to like either candidate much. In July of 2016, a Gallup poll found that both Clinton and Trump had the exact same unfavorable rating of 58%. But your own devil is always better than the other side’s.

On January 21st between 3.6 and 4.6 million people attended the Women’s March, making it the biggest inaugural protest in US history. And since his inauguration, President Trump has only had two days when his approval rating was higher than his disapproval rating and that was January 24-25 at 46% approve, 45% disapprove. As of February 14th his approval rating was at 40%.

There aren’t polls to show the number of Facebook debates, ended relationships, and shouting matches which this election has caused – though I am sure it is alarmingly high. What there is, are polls which show -in no uncertain terms- the line which those fights run down. There is no gradient, no back and forth. This line runs hard and true, right down race, religion, gender and party. Right through the middle of America.

And it is tearing us apart.

 

*Numbers taken from a compilation of CNN, New York Times and NBC exit polls