And winning is always better than losing. As Drake Bennett put it in the Boston Globe:

"Presidents remake the country after they are elected, not before," emphasizes Princeton's Wilentz. "It's not the elections that do it, it's the administrations that do it." Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson may have owed their electoral victories in part to prior defeats, but they owed their lasting legacy to what they did after they won. Elections are about ideas and interests and organization and circumstance. But they are also about power, and in general, it seems, it's better to have it than not.

I hope upon hope that Americans can at least briefly rally around whoever the next president is, and take a moment to remember our commonalities greatly outweigh our differences, but one of the greatest baseball writers of all time, Roger Angell, is not optimistic in that regard:

Perhaps there was a time when a close and angry election like this one could be expected to produce some easy joy and a rough, semi-polite unanimity when it was over, and a little space when the candidates and the pollsters and the focus groups and the voters went home and thought about what it was that first hooked them on such passion, but it does not come quickly to mind. Now the imminent world, with its round-the-clock, round-the-hour schedule of crises and casualties and unfolding disasters, does not permit even a two-minute timeout. What we all could use right now is fifteen weeks till pitchers and catchers. [New Yorker]