2) It's hard to have any real sense of what elections in the 1860s felt like, but at the very least this feels like the most acrimonious race in the past 50 years.
That means a lot of things. One is that the new administration was handed a delicate, important, difficult task.
3) The nation is always divided, always ways, and always will be, in many ways.
And so there are always debates and votes and dissenters. It's our right as American citizens to vote our conscience, and it's representatives' rights to vote theirs, in the House and Senate.