Editorial: It’s time to vote. All will be glad when this singularly nasty election is over.

Election Day has arrived. Each of the two major presidential nominees has painted a dire and dystopian picture of America for 2025 — if the other candidate wins.

We’re more optimistic.

Whoever emerges as the winner Tuesday or several days later, we think America’s political system will survive. We have faith in the checks and balances and the fundamental decency of most Americans. We think reality will soften radical positions and maybe, just maybe, a smidgen of bipartisanship will return.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t lament the baseness of this presidential election — the personal viciousness that has been a longtime feature of the exhausting Donald J. Trump era and that has, more and more, also been adopted by those who oppose him, especially as the race tightened. We lament the name calling, the scare tactics and the dearth of details about what each candidate will actually do for the American people, should voters put their faith in them.

All of this has contributed to a feeling of national anxiety, compounded by how social media platforms amplify and feed on political division. Both presidential campaigns tried to co-opt the emotion known as joy, but neither was willing to maintain it when the darker arts of campaigning seemed to become more effective. And so it is hard to imagine many Americans taking joy into the polling booth with them Tuesday; we suspect that the rise in early voting was at least in part a consequence of people wanting to get the task out of the way so they could move on with their lives.

As for election night parties, we don’t hear of many folks holding them. The presidential election is too close for comfort for either side, and a loss would be too devastating to be accompanied by canapes.

Was it ever thus? Some might claim so. We think this one feels more that way than any other in our memories. Certainly, the 78-year-old Trump’s political career is likely to end with a loss and not soon enough for many of our readers. Kamala Harris’ future is less clear, but it’s hard to see her successfully running again for high office.

Four years from now, we hope for better candidates for the highest office in the land. A better Democrat would be easily beating Trump. A better Republican would be easily beating Harris.

On a local level, this election includes for the first time seats on the Chicago Board of Education. These races, too, have been a bitter, lamentable process, focused not so much on what these adults can and will do for the city’s kids but on whether the board members will fire the current chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools and how much they will (or will not) kowtow to the unstinting demands of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Rigorous debate over education policy is a good thing; the climate around the Chicago Board of Education, whose previous board resigned en masse and whose appointed replacements were proven, in some cases, to be ill-chosen, has been toxic. In this case, that could perhaps be attributed to a new process, but we all can hope for drastic improvements in the next cycle. It could not be any worse than this time around.

So, for most of us, it’s now a matter of scurrying through the autumnal cold and doing our duty with more worry than actual enthusiasm. It has been that kind of election cycle.

We hope for a brighter elective future. But voting remains our democratic duty.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

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