WASHINGTON—Playing down any hope that they would draw a single valuable insight from the current election cycle, voters across the nation admitted Saturday they are probably going to come out of this whole thing having learned the completely wrong lessons. “We should definitely have learned something substantive about the dangers of political polarization or even social media echo chambers, but we’re almost certainly going to end up walking away from this with some other conclusion that’s way, way off-base,” said Atlanta resident Tyler Gore, 34, adding that no amount of hindsight would enable him and millions of his fellow citizens to extract a meaningful takeaway about the country’s political discourse. “We’re definitely going to claim that we gained some new understanding from this election, but it’s far more likely to be some nonsense about the media manipulating polls than a real lesson about, say, our primary system empowering the most extreme voters. Whatever happens, I guarantee we are not getting this right.” At press time, the nation also acknowledged that on the off chance it did learn a useful lesson from this election, it would surely forget it by the next one.

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