RED, BLACK AND BLUE

Hours after the 2004 election came to an emotional end midday Wednesday, campaign placards still littered the landscape like muskets discarded on a battlefield. They hinted of passions still not cooled, scores unsettled.

On a winding road in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, an official Bush-Cheney sign was shadowed on a neighbor’s lawn by a hand-scrawled one supporting Kerry. “We love our neighbors,” the Kerry sign explained, “but not their politics.”

Across the great divide of the red and the blue, the polarized presidential race left Americans conflicted over their differences and uncertain about how to begin the healing.

“We’re still divided,” Jamel Shimpfky, 63, said as she waited for a flight at Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia. As a New York psychiatrist, she has a distanced clinician’s understanding of the toll taken by perpetual conflict. But as a Kerry supporter, she was in the dumps. “Maybe we have to fall before we get up.”

From a pricey swath of the Atlanta suburbs to a campaign-weary ward in Columbus, Ohio, to a Republican stronghold in Issaquah, Wash., the common refrain seemed to be a yearning for softer voices and an urge toward common ground.

“I think we have to put all this stuff behind us and go forward as a country,” said Bush supporter Jessica Davis, 35, as she loaded groceries into her car in Issaquah, east of Seattle. “Easy for me to say, on the winning side, but we can’t go on like this. There has to be a way to disagree in a civil manner.”

But even as a triumphant President Bush promised to “do all I can do to deserve your trust” and his defeated rival, Sen. John F. Kerry, urged his supporters to “bridge the partisan divide,” there were divisions in both parties on how to proceed.

In a small Montana town near the border with Canada, Richard Ford, whose novels mine the depths of the American condition, wondered if “we need a new vocabulary.”

In Malibu, Ted McAllister, a conservative scholar of public policy at Pepperdine University, despaired about “our rush to label people.”

And a Virginian who preaches the art of cultural compromise worried aloud “whether we’ve given up trying to talk to each other.”

“The problem is we’re not even on the same wavelength; we’re just talking past each other,” said Dr. Charles Haynes, a senior scholar with the First Amendment Center who has spent years traveling the country trying to forge consensus on hot-button issues. “And it seems like our leaders have a vested interest in keeping it that way.”

Day After in Columbus

On Berrybush Drive in north Columbus, a stretch of Colonial-style homes known to Ohio voting officials as Ward 62, neighbors were taking one step at a time toward civility. The state capital, culturally conservative and wracked by job loss, had been one of the most hotly contested spots in the final weeks of the election -- both Bush and Kerry had swung through.

Uprooting the clusters of Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs was the first order of a return to normality, a little like shaving after a long weekend. By nightfall, dozens of signs that had sprouted for months like tiny billboards on lawn after lawn were suddenly gone, hefted into trash cans and garages.

Patrick Mildenberg, 34, a Bush supporter, had already begun stringing up his Christmas lights.

A former sergeant who spent 11 1/2 years in the Army, including a stint in the Persian Gulf War, Mildenberg said he had been stunned by “the way that our politics has become so harsh, so very divisive. It seems to me that both parties are forced to go to the extremes, and then you have to pick sides.”

Despite voting for Bush, Mildenberg said, he had voted against the state’s initiative banning same-sex marriage, which passed by a 62% to 38% margin. “I really believe that in 30 years, we’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was a stupid argument to have.’ ”

He had also spent months trying to stay civil with neighbor Anne Moc, 35, whose two preschool-age daughters often played with his two young sons. “We’ve basically said, ‘So let’s agree to disagree,’ ” Mildenberg said, “and let the kids play.”

But Moc’s Kerry lawn sign was still up by day’s end. Civility would have to wait.

“I know I should, the election’s over, but I just can’t bring myself to do it,” Moc said. She mused about leaving the sign “up for the next four years so people will know, hey, I didn’t vote for what’s happening.”

Feeling Sore

In the Morningside section of Atlanta, Tania Herbert and Peter Roberts were so alienated by Bush’s win that they weren’t sure they could live in a neighborhood with so many Republicans. Herbert stayed in her car rather than chat with another soccer mom who she knew supported Bush. Her emotions, she admitted, were still raw.

There were hard feelings even in remote Chinook, Mont., a town of 1,200 near the U.S. border with Saskatchewan where few residents even bothered to put up signs. The town is such a Republican stronghold that few Bush supporters felt the need to show their allegiance. Stray Kerry signs were ignored as curiosities.

Ford, the owner of one of the Kerry signs, spent the day in a funk. After watching Bush’s victory speech, the native Mississippian whose novel “Independence Day” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, said he was angered by the election results and offended by assumptions by political leaders and television commentators that Western states such as Montana could be easily chalked off as another “red state.”

The charged political discourse that seemed so vividly rancorous in Washington, or even in Columbus, appeared distant and strange, Ford said, to ranchers and farmers who “spend their days moving cattle around and just don’t have any stake in most of these arguments.”

“These divisions are so simplistic,” Ford said.

“The health of the republic depends on our capacity to work out issues together,” agreed McAllister, a historian of the nation’s conservative movement. “Both sides are speaking in slogans now, and it’s making it hard to settle problems with a common purpose.”

Despite his own conservative tilt, McAllister said he was dismayed by the sparring between the Bush and Kerry campaigns all through the fall. McAllister said he worried that a “language of division” had taken over public discourse.

In Jacksonville, Fla., tough language led to tough tactics. Clyde Collins, 48, head of the Jacksonville Democratic Party and a veteran of more than two decades of hard-fought political races, said this was the most contentious campaign he had endured. And it would be a long time, he said, before he would be able to look local Republicans in the eye.

“Never have I seen such vindictiveness from people on either side of a political cause,” he said. “I saw a woman holding a Kerry banner on a street corner sprayed with fluid from a passing car.”

Another man, he said, had 30 Kerry posters ripped up in his yard. “We’re just not used to seeing this kind of thing in this Southern town. There was so much anger on both sides, and I don’t know how we’re going to get over it,” Collins said.

Fermin Ortiz, who came to Jacksonville from Austin, Texas, as part of an army of Bush poll workers, said emotions were just as high yesterday, even when it became clear that his candidate had won. When a Kerry backer approached him on the street and sneered at Bush as “that cowboy from Texas,” Ortiz let him rant.

“I told him, ‘I respect your opinion. Would you respect mine?’ If Kerry had won and I was in the same position he was, I’d like to think that I would have walked up and shook his hand and congratulated him.”

He reached out to shake the man’s hand, but the stranger stormed off. Ortiz, who owns a martial arts studio, said his training in dealing with anger helped some. “I’ve always been an athlete. If I got knocked down or if I hit someone else hard, I’d help them up and say, ‘Good hit.’ That’s what you do.”

But Ortiz went further: He took off his Bush-Cheney buttons and slipped them into his pocket.

“I took them off because I didn’t want people to think that I was taunting them,” he said. “And I’m glad I did, especially after I heard Sen. Kerry’s concession speech. I have a lot of respect for him, the way he bowed out.”

But even after listening to Kerry and Bush talk of coming together, Ortiz said he was “worried about our nation. There are a lot of people who do not like each other or what they believe in. And I don’t know how long that is going to take to heal. Or if it can ever heal.”

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Times staff writers Ellen Barry in Atlanta, John-Thor Dahlburg in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., John M. Glionna in Jacksonville, Scott Gold in Houston, Kathleen Hennessey in Madison, Wis., Lynn Marshall in Seattle, Elizabeth Shogren in Cleveland, Sam Howe Verhovek in Columbus and Emma Schwartz in Washington contributed to this report.