DN editorial: Election has left us with two Americas

AT PRESS TIME Tuesday night, the presidential election was going into extra innings, in a nail-biter that makes the seventh game of the World Series game feel like a nap.

While we don't at this point know who won, what we do know is that many expectations were turned on their heads: mainly, that a bombastic, unqualified candidate with no record of public service with a disorganized, undisciplined organization and little support from his party was still able to attract votes at the same rate as a seasoned, experienced candidate who has prepared for this job much of her life.

Throughout this campaign, much of the debate focused on the undecided voter, but in this case "undecided" meant that neither candidate held much appeal.

Still, the high voting turnout numbers from Tuesday for two "unpopular" candidates suggests that people were indeed engaged in this election. Maybe that's not so surprising, and we suspect that one big motivator for the crowds at the polls was fear: Clearly, those who voted for Donald Trump bought into the fear that their candidate instilled in rally after rally: that America is no longer great, that we are a laughingstock, that immigrants are going to take over, and if they don't, the terrorists will.

While Hillary Clinton's campaign reacted with a message of "love trumps hate," and sold unity with "Stronger Together," the fact is that Democrats also capitalized on fear to galvanize voters: the fear of a Trump presidency.

With no clear winner apparent late Tuesday night, we don't know which fear was the bigger motivator.

So we'll talk about our fear: that the United States of America is less united than we'd like to believe. We fear that there are two Americas: one America that is inclusive, progressive, and looks to the future, and another America that is suspicious of outsiders, wants to return to a simpler time that no longer exists (if it ever did) and that is restrictive of human, civil, and reproductive rights.

A companion fear: that this country could be forfeiting the leadership role it has held in the world since World War II, with an unstable leader at its head.

As Tuesday night's electoral map was filled in with results, what was striking was how the nation's divisions appear to be equal in size.

And among the jobs faced by whoever is the final winner of this strange, painfully long election, this will be the most important: finding and building more bridges between these two separate countries.

Forget the actual problems of our roads, highways and bridges - the infrastructure of our democracy needs the most work of all.

Unfortunately, we believe that only one of the candidates is open to that task.