UNIONTOWN, Pa. — Two houses, sitting side by side on the edge of this Fayette County town, display presidential campaign signs.

The one on the left is for Donald Trump; the one on the right, Hillary Clinton.

As both neighbors tidied their lawns atop sloping yards on a sunny fall afternoon, they chatted, shared a rake, pulled weeds and chased leaves.

From a distance, their political differences appear to have no impact on common courtesies. Why?

Because they share common threads in their daily lives — schools, civic activities, church, restaurants, the local economy, regional sports and a sense of belonging to the same community.

Several hours later on that same Saturday, Twitter and other forms of social media exploded with a thunderous clap of “Aha!” when the New York Times reported getting a copy of Trump’s 1995 tax return showing that he claimed a net operating loss of $916 million that year.

Nearly every liberal Washington- or New York-based reporter, as well as Clinton supporters and Trump-hating conservatives, became whipped into a joyous frenzy that this story would finally knock him out.

“The theatrics displayed on social media, then on the network cable news stations and across the country in wire stories, was so different from how I saw the information,” said Ben, a Pittsburgh-based medical professional who declined to give his last name because of how “deeply strident, intolerant and disrespectful” people tend to be when they find out someone supports Trump.

“First of all, people on Twitter or reporters do not seem to know a lot about taxes,” Ben said. He added that the social-media world and the real world are so distinct, especially in this election, as to be almost unrecognizable to each other: “We share nothing in common with each other anymore. One world exists in a very cosmopolitan echo chamber that feeds off of each other’s ‘hot takes,’ and the other world is wedded in community and operates in total defiance of the echo chamber.”

Not that long ago, America was a country of common experiences. People shopped in department stores, ate similar foods, watched the same TV shows and the same movies, attended neighborhood schools and churches together.

These cultural experiences crossed many lines: race, class, wealth, education.

Today the culture is fractured, according to Bruce Haynes, a GOP media expert and founding partner of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan consulting firm in Alexandria, Va.

“The elites in our society don’t share the same cultural experiences,” Haynes said. “As Charles Murray says, we’ve come apart. The CEO, the senator, the Harvard PhD — they no longer live in the same neighborhood as the manager, the sheriff, the school teacher.”

Their kids don’t go to the same schools, he explained; they don’t go to the same churches, if they go at all. They don’t watch the same movies; they shop in different specialty stores, eat and vacation in different places.

“It’s even filtered into the once-sacred field of sports,” said Haynes. “It used to be that the plumber and the lawyer were equal in the stands of an NFL game; now, the economics of the game are changing, and the plumber may not be able to afford the seats.”

And if they did sit together, they’d probably argue not over who should win or lose but whether it’s appropriate to take a knee during the national anthem.

“Diversity can be beautiful but there is a downside,” said Haynes. “Without common cultural experiences, there is little basis for commonality and conversation. People of different experiences see the world very differently, perceive different sets of problems and, therefore, different solutions.”

Income inequality is, in that way, a symptom of cultural and educational inequality. We’ve become as much a culturally segregated society as anything else.

So on Twitter, where the majority of those participating in the higher end of the political discussion engage with each other on the news of the moment, their perception of where this race is going and why it should be going that way is seen through their lives.

“The world of Twitter is a never-ending creation of the crisis of the day, but underneath the daily hunt for eyeballs and the ‘Oh, look, something new happened here today — oh, wait, no it didn’t,’ is a lot of nothing,” said Ben.

“There is a wide gap between us, not just on social media or politics, but in culture and commerce, and I am not sure how we fix it,” Ben said, drawing a conclusion that this great divide will continue long past Nov. 8.