Tuesday’s elections may leave America more divided than ever. Here’s why

Voter information guides are displayed at a vote center in Los Angeles on October 27, during early in-person voting for the California Proposition 50 special election. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

This week’s election will likely mark another milestone in the partitioning of America into divergent and increasingly hostile blocs of red and blue states.

From New Jersey and Virginia to California, Tuesday’s results are poised to extend a process that has allowed each party to consolidate political control over a huge swath of the country and that is heightening conflict among the states to a degree unmatched since the civil rights era in the 1960s — if not, the Civil War a century before that.

This week’s voting could further this separation in two distinct ways. Democratic victori