Like many voters Mike Hart, a magazine publisher from Texas, has spent much of 2016 hankering for a return to civility in American politics and to the days when you could disagree politely with friends and family and leave it at that.
This year, the Hillary Clinton supporter says, the volume and the anger have been dialled up so much that he has employed a 21st century solution: blocking the irate Donald Trump supporters among his friends on Facebook.
In his own dilemma he sees signs of a national malaise and a divided country. “The level of anger is way beyond anything I have ever seen,” he says.
In President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address he declared Americans had chosen “unity of purpose over conflict and discord”. This year America turned that on its head.
From Mr Trump’s pledge to prosecute his opponent and “lock her up” to Mrs Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, the campaign has been full of conflict and discord. Moreover, the two most unpopular US presidential candidates in modern political history sit atop bases filled with loathing for the other.
“I think I have some work to do to bring the country together,” Mrs Clinton, who has led in the polls for months now, said on the eve of the election. “I really do want to be the president for everybody.”
The political parties
Both Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton have sought to make this election a high-stakes referendum on their rival’s suitability for office. But acrimony in US politics predates 2016 and is likely to endure well into the future.
When the non-partisan Pew Research Center analysed ideological shifts by supporters of the two main parties it found they had each increasingly been driven away from the middle – and pragmatic compromise – in recent decades. It also found growing hostility, according to Jocelyn Kiley, a Pew researcher. “There’s more negative feeling about people on the other side of the political aisle than there was 20 years ago,” she says.
Education as the big divider
The biggest divide in American politics today is based on education.
If polls hold true, Mrs Clinton this year will become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win nationally among white university-educated voters since pollsters began collecting such data in 1952. That would solidify her party’s growing dependence in recent elections on the country’s educated voters.
Donald Trump’s strongest constituency, meanwhile, has been white voters with a high school education or less. And that means a Republican party once associated with the management classes is now finding its core support in disgruntled blue-collar Americans.
And yet America is also becoming increasingly educated. In 1992 voters with a high school education or less made up half the electorate. This year, two-thirds of voters will have at least some tertiary education.
Battle of the sexes
With this year’s election featuring the first major-party female presidential candidate, gender was always going to play a role. That has only been amplified by the groping allegations levelled against Mr Trump. Those dynamics have contributed to what by some calculations is the biggest gender gap in the American electorate seen since the 1950s, though women for decades have favoured Democratic candidates.
Confronting the Republican party after this election is the difficult task of closing that gap after a year that has damaged its relationship with women and particularly educated women.
Generational wars
When voters in the UK decided earlier this year to exit the EU, one of the underlying stories was the divide between young voters eager to remain and older Britons keen to leave. More-over, that young voters did not turn out at the same rate as older voters may have in the end decided Britain’s fate.
The US is facing a similar divide in 2016 even as millennials are on the cusp of becoming the country’s largest voting bloc. Voters under 35 are more likely to lean towards the Democrats but also have tended to turn out at lower rates in recent elections. Meanwhile, according to Pew, almost 60 per cent of Republican voters are over 50.
Racially polarised
As the first black man to occupy the highest office in the land, Mr Obama took office in January 2009 promising to be uniting. But, politically, America is more racially polarised than it has been at any point in the past 25 years.
This year’s campaign – and Mr Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and portrayal of black communities as crime-ridden – has also hurt Republicans’ efforts to reach out to minorities.
While the Democratic party has been diversifying its base over the past quarter of a century, the Republican party has changed very little. According to Pew’s calculations, while 70 per cent of the electorate is white this year, the proportion of white Republican party supporters is greater, at 86 per cent.
Divided airwaves
It is not just at the voting booth that Republicans and Democrats differ. In the fundamental building blocks of their lives – where and how they live and shop, what sorts of houses they prefer and what they watch and listen to on television and radio – it is not hard to find evidence of an America where communities are increasingly choosing a form of cultural segregation.
That starts with news sources. Progressives love their National Public Radio while conservatives trust their Fox News. But for years ratings company Nielsen has also been documenting divergences in music listening habits. Country music listeners are as likely to be Democrats as Republicans.
But radio stations that play “urban” music, or hip hop, have a decidedly Democratic listenership.
