There is no new political divide. We see news stations claiming something along the lines of the world (and in particular the United States) being more divided politically than ever before. To this i have only one thing to say back... bullhickey!
The political divide has always existed. The only thing that has changed is our awareness of it because social media and the ability to talk to anyone, anytime, has changed. Our political differences have been a thing that we never spoke about in the past because well, you had to do it face-to-face or on some anonymous forum. I remember even back when I was in university the topic would come up sometimes and then we would be a LOT more polite than someone will be on FB for example. We would likely have a logical exchange of ideas also, but now it is just a bunch of people shouting at strangers and nothing ever gets accomplished.
For the sake of simplicity I am going to only look at Presidential elections in the United States for the past 50 years or so. I want to point out that nearly every single one of these things have had a near 50 / 50 split in the votes. Sure the electoral college changes things and what not but do you remember when Bob Dole ran against a wildly-popular-at-the-time Bill Clinton? Ok, Bill Clinton won by 8%. There was no uniting under one flag. The divide is not new.
What is new is our constant influx of horse-S**T stories that pop up on our newsfeeds, the obviously biassed news networks that may as well just change the names of their organizations to solidify their stance with one particular political stance. Fox is Republican, and everyone else is Democrat; everyone knows this. It should come as no surprise that the stories they cover happen to reflect exactly that.
In the U.K. the whole Brexit thing (which I admit i know very little about) was a near 50 / 50 thing. The elections in most of Europe fall upon the same lines.
The last time the United States had a completely overwhelming presidential victory was when this guy was running at the result was around 75 / 25.
and well, there is a good chance that you already know what happened with that.
What I am trying to say is that anytime that anyone on some a*hole network tries to say that "Such and such candidate is strengthening the political divide" and you are within arms' reach of them, I highly suggest you slap them to try to knock some of the bullsht outta their brain. This simply is not true. People being conservative vs. liberal is not a new thing. We have been this way for a long time.
I live in Thailand and guess what? There is around a 50 / 50 split on the political ideologies of the people here as well. Vietnam is the same. It is almost as though the figures are fabricated, kind of like the whole "Hillary Clinton has a 95% chance of winning the Presidency." It's a load of crap and it makes me angry to see people claim this is the case when there is very little in the way of evidence to support this.
We are either being lied to about the numbers or the political divide just kind of sort of meets its normalization around50% anyway. I would be willing to believe either one of these things because they always make more sense than the "such and such person is dividing (insert country here) bullcrap that fills the airwaves these days.