One Election Night a year ago didn’t get us to this place.
Long before Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton for the presidency last year, the nation was facing steadily rising social and political tensions rooted in diverging reactions to the relentless economic, demographic and cultural changes reshaping American life. But the bruising 2016 race between Trump and Clinton widened these divisions to a new extreme. In the starkly contrasting pattern of support each candidate inspired, the election functioned something like a bolt of lighting on a starless night: It illuminated, with sudden starkness, a political landscape deeply fractured along lines of race, generation, class and geography.
One tumultuous year later, and one year before the 2018 midterm election, those fissures look only more imposing. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN