For the last few months I kept hearing people say “I can’t wait until this election is over,” and not just because they didn’t like the candidates.

Even though you always hear that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes,” this one seemed like it really could be because it raised an interesting question: What kind of country is this?

Well, here we are. The election is over and our questions have been answered.

Sort of.

The “most important elections of our lifetimes” might be behind us, but the really important questions are still unanswered. This campaign did not invent divisions over race, class or gender, but it certainly exposed the ones that exist and we can’t pretend that they are going disappear with the used yard signs and bumper stickers.

The Donald Trump for president campaign was all about race and by that I don’t mean that Donald Trump supporters are all racists. I mean they were almost all one race – white.

We have never really thought of issues that directly affect white people to be “racial issues.” They were just “issues.” White was the default race, and if they affected white people they were problems for society as a whole.

In this season, it was different. White voters, especially white people without a college education, have become a subgroup that had different problems than those for the country as a whole.

Trump’s anger at trade deals, immigration policy, his proposed ban on Muslims and especially his overarching promise to “make America great again” were pitched to appeal to white working-class voters in places like rural Maine, where industry has disappeared and the future looks worse than the past.

Even when he was allegedly reaching out to black voters by calling their communities uninhabitable hell-holes (“What have you got to lose?”), he was really reflecting the disgust rural people feel for big cities.

Trump owned this slice of the electorate, but it’s not the force it once was. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, white voters without a college degree were responsible for more than two thirds of all the votes cast. In 2012 they made up about one third. This year it will likely be even less.

Older white people are not used to being thought of as a subgroup in an election, but we were in this one. An election that’s this racially lopsided is evidence of a divide in the country that will not be resolved by counting the votes.

The other leftover business of this election is sexism.

If there were an “issue” fought out over these months it was not deficits or foreign policy, it was the role of women in our society and men’s comfort with it.

You would expect that in a race with the first-ever woman nominated by a major party, but it was Trump not Hillary Clinton who brought it out of the background. The famous “Access Hollywood” tape in which he brags about kissing women without consent and grabbing their genitals inspired a parade of women to come forward with their stories about how they had been abused.

And these were not just the women who said Trump had taken advantage of them, but countless others from all walks of life who said they had been harassed and belittled by men but had said nothing at the time because they didn’t think anyone would listen.

Millions of women went to the polls Tuesday and voted thinking about the boss who had bullied and intimidated them.

The politics of race and sex are not new, but they have been rubbed raw in the 2016 campaign, and nothing that happened at the voting booth will change that.

Which raises the question of what people were expecting when they wished that the election was over.

It’s probably the big mistake that a lot of us make when we think about change in a political context.

We call one candidate a “change agent” and another a “captive of the status quo” as if even a president of the United States could bring back the past or hold off the future.

But you can’t. Change is happening all the time and you couldn’t stop it any more than you could refuse to grow older.

The divisions exposed in this election won’t go away just because the votes are counted. The real work is still ahead.

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Greg Kesich is the editorial page editor. He can be contacted at:

gkesich@pressherald.com

Twitter @gregkesich