With Election Day less than two months away, I thought that this would be a good time to compare and contrast the tax plans of the two major contenders.

Just kidding!

At this point, who cares? It’s not as if there are millions of “undecided” voters sitting around kitchen tables saying, “Well, I do like the way that Trump would quadruple the standard deduction, but on the other hand, Clinton makes a good point about gradually easing the capital gains rates on assets held for more than a year. I just can’t make up my mind!”

If these kinds of conversations ever happened in America, they aren’t happening now. Instead, we are in the middle of a clash between cultural forces in which who you are and how you live has more to do with who gets your vote than any policy idea – making 2016 more like a census than an election.

Issues seem irrelevant when no one really believes that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would be able to get much of their program through a Congress that is as divided as the nation.

Instead, we talk about what the candidates would like to hide from us, making Trump’s tax returns more interesting than his tax policy and Clinton’s personal health more important than her health care plan.

The surreal presence of a reality TV star in the race makes this one of the strangest elections ever, and it could represent a turning point in American history. But don’t expect this to be a battle of ideas.

So who makes up the Trump forces? Clinton got in trouble for saying that half of them are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

She had to apologize, but she’s probably not that far off. Nativism has been the one constant in Trump’s speeches and public appearances. Everything else is negotiable.

Clinton and many Republicans describe the rest of Trump’s supporters as people who have lost their jobs to foreign competition or immigrant labor, and feel the elites of both parties have let them down.

But Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist with Gallup, studied 87,000 interviews and 16 months’ worth of polling data that debunked that theory. Rothwell did not find that being directly affected by international trade or immigration made you more likely to support Trump, and his supporters were not more likely than supporters of other candidates to be unemployed or to have lower incomes.

The polls did show overwhelming number of Trump supporters to be white and call themselves “very conservative.”

There are also some common characteristics about the places in which they live. “Constant support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates, far from the Mexican border and in neighborhoods that stand out within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, Asians and Hispanics,” he wrote.

In other words, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his rants about the dysfunction of black communities are most potent in places like Maine where there are few actual immigrants or blacks.

What are the forces behind Clinton?

According to the Pew Research Center, she has strong leads with women, voters under 50 and people with a college degree or more.

She is beating Trump among black voters by 85 percent to 2 percent, and Hispanics by a 2-to-1 ratio. Her support is heaviest with people who have the lowest incomes and the highest incomes, while Trump’s supporters are distributed more evenly among those in the middle.

The biggest divides might be in attitude. Clinton supporters are five times more likely to say that life is better now for people like them than it was 50 years ago, and nearly twice as likely to think that things will be better still for the next generation. Seventy-two percent of Clinton supporters say that America is better off because of its increased diversity, while only 40 percent of Trump supporters would agree.

It’s almost as if we live in two different countries divided by sex, race and attitude, and regardless of who wins the election, we will be moving further apart, not coming together.

How do you govern a country where people can’t agree over which problems are the most serious, let alone how they should be solved? That’s the real issue these candidates should be talking about.

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