elections can either pull a country together or tear it apart. with election day nearly at hand, it is a statement of the painfully obvious to say that campaign 2016 fell into the latter category. worse, there is ample reason to believe the campaign has inflicted wounds that won<u+2019>t be easy to heal before the politicians who survive must turn to actually governing the country. has the nation ever before experienced an election in which leaders of one party are talking of impeaching a new president of the other party before the ballots are even in? yet perhaps it doesn<u+2019>t have to be as bleak as it sounds. perhaps there are some silver linings in the dark clouds that hang over this year<u+2019>s vote. here are a few more-optimistic possibilities: perhaps the coarse and vulgar debate of 2016 will shock everyone into returning to more civil discourse in this country. perhaps by shaking the establishment of both parties to the core, this year<u+2019>s campaign will wring out a corrosive tendency toward complacency and arrogance among the elites. perhaps by bringing forth a donald trump who went far by simply declaring that he knew how to get something done, this campaign will cause both parties to see that, at some point, sheer obstructionism actually does carry a political price. perhaps by bringing forth a bernie sanders, who played pied piper to an army of young followers, this year<u+2019>s election will show that millennials actually can be turned on to politics, just not the politics of the status quo. perhaps everybody will step back, take a deep breath, and say: let<u+2019>s not do it this way again. perhaps the parties will rethink the way they choose presidential nominees, and congress will reform how it does<u+2014>or doesn<u+2019>t<u+2014>do business. perhaps the political system has hit rock bottom and now can rebound. capital journal is wsj.com<u+2019>s home for election 2016 news. the chances of any of this happening will depend a lot on the kind of leadership that america<u+2019>s newly elected officials<u+2014>in the white house and in congress<u+2014>show after voting ends tuesday. but the chances also depend on the american people summoning the spirit of unity and community that has drawn the country together over and over again in times of genuine crisis. right now, it<u+2019>s hard to see that spirit. conversations about the choice between mr. trump and hillary clinton, either in small conversations around dinner tables or at large forums in hotel ballrooms, are tense and angry, sometimes verging on shouting matches. <u+201c>we are at each other<u+2019>s throats,<u+201d> said one voter in a focus group sponsored over the weekend by cbs news . the country has been divided politically for a while now, of course, but that divide has been along traditional lines: republicans from democrats, conservatives from liberals. the divides that showed up in 2016, by contrast, were <u+201c>unprecedented<u+201d> says bill mcinturff, a republican pollster who is the co-director of the wall street journal/nbc news poll. this year<u+2019>s rifts were of a more fundamental, almost primal nature, running along the most basic lines of society: gender, race and education. a look inside the final journal/nbc pre-election poll , completed this weekend, illuminates those lines. most notably, a new education gap has opened up. when voters were given a two-way choice between the major candidates, mrs. clinton led 51% to 41% among whites with college degrees. he led among whites without college degrees by a 2-1 ratio. he had the support of 3 in 5 rural americans, she 3 in 5 urban americans. and more traditional divides now are gaping chasms. she led among nonwhite voters by 75% to 15%. moreover, this was an election in which voters in the trump and clinton camps haven<u+2019>t simply disagreed on whom to choose. many supporting one candidate can<u+2019>t even conceive of how fellow citizens could choose the other. perhaps most alarming, 90% of clinton voters said in the poll that they wouldn<u+2019>t feel comfortable with and be inclined to support mr. trump as president, while just over 90% of trump voters expressed the same feelings about mrs. clinton as president. in both the trump and clinton camps, more than half said the country would remain divided after the election. it has been a long ride through campaign 2016. mrs. clinton announced her candidacy almost 18 months ago; mr. trump his almost 16 months ago. perhaps it was merely the harsh feelings toward these two particular candidates that created much of the tension that surrounds tuesday<u+2019>s choice. in any case, if the upshot of campaign 2016 is that voters feel better because they have gotten their chance to vent at the establishment, and washington learns to listen better to the country, it will not have been in vain. there will be cause for hope. write to gerald f. seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
seeking hope in a dispiriting 2016 election - wsj
gerald f. seib