So if voters hand him an overwhelming defeat, it’s a bold statement, with undeniable messages.

They’d be saying that sexism like his is intolerable. That’s evident in the yawning gender gap that he confronts, in the disproportionate number of women who are voting early and in the possible surge, after Election Day, of women in Congress. The Year of Trump is turning out to be the true Year of the Woman, and not only because of a glass ceiling’s shattering.

This gives Clinton a mandate to make sure our public discourse and laws never treat women as subordinate to men.

Voters who weren’t intrinsically anti-Trump but ended up in that column are punishing him for the way he attacked the Khan family, Alicia Machado and so many others before and since. That’s clear in the words and timing of Republican leaders who defected from Trump. Each reached a point where, for reasons moral or political, Trump’s pettiness and viciousness could no longer be shrugged off.

There’s a mandate for Clinton in this as well. It’s to rise above and push back at the corrosive politics of insult, and she did more to betray than to honor this with her “basket of deplorables.”

An unorthodox candidate, Trump has run an unholy campaign that pits honest-to-goodness Americans, whoever they are, against others, including Mexican rapists, a Mexican-American judge, a president with Kenya in his blood and anyone with the Quran on a night stand. This appeals to an unsettlingly sizable group of voters.

But its repudiation by a definitive majority would tell Clinton that she’s being trusted, as Trump never could be, to lift us above such labeling and — to borrow a bit from her own stump speech — build bridges instead of walls.

While her election might not be any validation of her prescriptions for health care, the Middle East or trade, it would say loudly and clearly that the country cannot survive the divisiveness that Trump promotes and will not abide the bigotry that he projects.

Acting in accordance with that wouldn’t give our first female president most (or even much) of the legislation that she wants. But it would give her all of the authority that she needs.