Residents say rallying around local issues helps them find common ground.
Fran Frederick, a school adjustment counselor at Belchertown High School, often tells students “you have more in common with the person sitting next to you in your high school classroom than you will probably have with any group of people for the rest of your life.”
“How do we focus on what we have in common more than what we have that’s different?” she asks them.
Relating to one another through common experiences serves as a way to bring people together, Frederick says.
“We have more in common than we do different because we all live in the same town in western Massachusetts,” she told Boston.com.
While Vice President Kamala Harris won Massachusetts decisively with just over 61% of the vote, many towns in the state saw much tighter results. In Royalston, the candidates were exactly tied, according to unofficial results, with 390 votes for Trump, and 390 votes for Harris.
In Bridgewater, Trump won with 50% of the vote, compared to Harris’s 49%. Still, Debbie Johnson, the Republican registrar for the town, says she has not seen any “real tension” in her community.