It is the morning after the 2016 election. Now what?

Lisabelle Panossian, Editor-in-Chief

The people around me have been shaken with disbelief and heartache here in California. No, the world was not coming to an end. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

For mainstream media and all of the Golden State, that sentence would have been declared as a perceived fallacy until last night at midnight.

There was nearly a 30 percent gap between President-elect Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in California, with Clinton taking over 60 percent of the vote, according to “The New York Times.”

Many other states such as Florida presented a contrast as the voting gap between Trump and Clinton was nearly 120,000 votes, with Trump claiming almost half of the vote.

Weeks leading up to the campaign, mainstream media polls reported a completely different story.

Fox News, “The Economist,” “Washington Post” and Gallup polls all reported 60 percent or more respondents claiming that Trump is an unfavorable candidate, according to RealClearPolitics.

Rather than presenting viewers and readers with senseless polling and reports of name-calling on both sides, news outlets should have reported on each candidate’s policies and plans for the future.

It is time to accept that our media, meant to be an overarching voice of the people, has failed us as a nation when electoral numbers speak a completely different language than reports and polls.

It is also time for us to accept that we as Californians, especially San Franciscans, live in a bubble of predominantly liberal ideas in a country that sees issues and events in a completely different lens.

Both of these dire problems in our country, surprisingly, have one simple solution: We have to stop forcing others to believe what we feel is “right” and start listening.

Rather than getting upset and protesting the rest of our nation, we must work together to find ways that unite us.

The last thing this country needs is a wider gap between Trump protesters and supporters.

The last thing we need is more wounds in a deeply damaged land that we call mine and yours.