Dale Koontz, a Hillary Clinton supporter in Arlington, Virginia, knew without asking that certain family members disagreed with her about the election. Her mother and grandmother were posting articles on Facebook supporting Donald Trump and excoriating Clinton. “I actually had one or two friends text me about it because they were concerned — ‘Is your mom voting for Trump?’ “

Koontz, 23, a staff assistant at a public-affairs firm, called her mother in North Carolina, and the discussion became heated. “She’s like, ‘Well, you’re not going to vote for [Clinton], right?’ — and it came out that I was. … It’s really difficult, because I’ve always been very, very close to both my mom and my grandma, rarely disagreeing with them. I’ve always looked up to my mom and respected her opinions.”

But it got to a point where Koontz was afraid to open her emails “because I was scared it would be another article,” she said.

Welcome to Election 2016. Americans are backed into their political corners, rarely encountering people in the flesh who do not think like them, except, for many, in one conspicuous place: their families.

Sometimes the dissenting relatives went to college and then moved far away from their home states, landing in different political waters. Sometimes it’s a case of generations divided. There also can be more political disagreement in white families, because they are more apt to include Trump and Clinton supporters.

Yet bridge building even between family members is rare during what is arguably the most contentious presidential campaign in recent memory. Instead, dissenting relatives frequently avoid talking politics in person to keep the family peace.

In such a divisive campaign, with its heavy themes of racial and ethnic bigotry and the candidates’ perceived character flaws, a family member’s political disagreement can easily begin to sound like a personal attack, said Andrew Christensen, a UCLA psychology professor.

For example, said Christensen, who researches conflicts within couples, “if the family member is supporting Trump and that implies that maybe they’re not so smart, or that they’re racist … then it becomes more fraught because they’re not just explaining why they support Trump but defending themselves.

“And it’s the same for someone who supports Hillary, who might be seen as elitist or a victim of political correctness,” he said.

Koontz said she objects to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and his views on immigration and race. Her mother and grandmother think Clinton represents corrupt politics as usual.

“I talked to my mom about that, about how she can be OK with the things that he says,” she said. “The issues that I care about are clearly less important to her, and they have issues that they’re maybe more worried about that I’m not.”

Social media makes relatives’ dissenting views more apparent than they might have been in the past.

Patricia Greene, 81, of Powdersville, South Carolina, plans to vote for Trump but does not talk about it with her son, a Clinton supporter. On the other hand, she said, “he’s very vocal on Facebook. … Sometimes I’ll look at his page, and there will be 15 entries about the sorry, rotten Republicans and things like that. I want to see a picture of maybe a garden he’s planted or maybe his grandchildren.”

When they get together, the family avoids political discussions. “I don’t think either side talks about their leanings, whether they’re conservative or liberal,” Greene said. “Probably we would if there weren’t so many differences in the family.”

For his part, her son, Raymond Myers, 65, an attorney in Nashville, said he believes Trump is a “con man” who is “part of the Republican Party’s proto-Nazi arm.”

“I post exactly those things on Facebook, and my sister has literally posted things like that the Clintons are having people murdered,” he said.

The differences run deep. Myers deplores Trump’s statements about immigrants and minorities, and said he believes they reflect poorly on those who would vote for him. “I think a large percentage of Trump supporters are out-and-out racist.”

Including his mother and sister? “Let’s say that I certainly have a concern about racism affecting who supports Trump and who supports Hillary,” he said. “In my Facebook posts, I say that Trump supporters are racist, so in that regard, yes.”

In turn, his sister posts items calling Clinton supporters racist. But when they meet face-to-face, they avoid the topic.

“It might be a cop-out, but I will say that nobody’s perfect,” Myers said. “I love my sister and mother — there are many good things about them, and I love those good things. So, I just compartmentalize those things.”

Melanie D’Evelyn, 33, an education-policy consultant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, grew up in a conservative family in Colorado — her uncle is a state co-chair for the Trump campaign. But she “went to the dark side in college in their view, “ she said. Now, she is in the uncomfortable position of having to reconcile her love for her relatives with political positions she abhors.

“I don’t think the stakes have ever been higher for a presidential election, and I have a feeling that my family members feel similarly,” she said. “My father-in-law is a Trump supporter. That conversation has been pretty traumatic for me, because he is by far one of the kindest, gentlest people I know.”

Her husband, James Arnott, is used to disagreeing with his father on politics. “But it is more difficult when I see someone like Trump,” said Arnott, 29, a researcher at the University of Michigan. “I almost feel like he’s getting snookered or something, so that makes me feel bad. It also makes me feel bad that the moral values that Trump represents are so different from what he represents and what they raised me to represent.”

Arnott said he is troubled by Trump’s comments about immigrants and race, his elevation of wealth as a worthy goal and his “complete and utter disregard to truth.” So, how does he reconcile someone he loves supporting him?

“I don’t think that supporting Trump makes my dad a bad person,” he said. “It’s a very noisy landscape out there, and it’s very difficult to get clear messages. I think he’s hearing different things from what I’m hearing, and he’s kind of building this architecture of ideas around what he’s hearing.”

Still, when Arnott’s mother-in-law pointed out a smugness in her son’s reasoning, it made him reconsider whether it is productive to talk about it with family members who disagree.

“I’ve always felt like dialogue is really important,” he said. “But in this instance I feel like being respectful of something that’s totally repugnant — what do you do in that situation, especially when you have family mixed up in that? I think taking a chill pill is probably the way to go.”

His father, Rocky Arnott, 70, a building construction specialist in Grand Junction, Colorado, said he is mystified by his children’s liberal turn, which he said happened when they went away to college.

“I don’t try to change their minds; I’m not very good at that,” he said. “Let’s see in the next few weeks if some people in my family will come around. … If they change their minds, I guess it will be because Trump changes.”

In the meantime, they use humor to take the edge off: D’Evelyn teases her mother about being responsible for a Trump presidency, and her mother jokes about getting together this Thanksgiving, when the world as her daughter knows it will have ended.

But a degree of strain persists.

“I find it perplexing, because we have so many shared values in the rest of the way that we live our lives,” D’Evelyn said. “It’s so confusing for me that something I care so much about, that we could be so diametrically opposed.”

For groups who feel targeted by Trump’s policies, that sense of bafflement can be particularly pronounced. Christian Garcia, a Mexican American teacher and business owner in San Diego, said he believes that a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster. Garcia, 29, cites the candidate’s plans to deport 11 million people and build a border wall, rhetoric that he says “demonizes Latinos.”

So it galls him that his brother Alfredo plans to vote for him.

Alfredo Garcia, 42, sees Trump’s antipathy toward political correctness as a refreshing antidote to “the sissification of America.” He admits to ribbing his brother about Trump’s rise in the polls. “He says, ‘Man, you can’t be serious — I’m going to disown you.’ “ The two spar three or four times a week, with the younger brother trying to change the older one’s mind.

“I’m obviously frustrated,” Christian Garcia said. “It usually ends with me saying he’s an idiot, and then we get past it.”

So what happens in a few weeks, when one side of the family is celebrating and the other side is reeling in horror?

If Clinton wins, Koontz plans to play it cool in front of her mother and grandmother. “They’re going to be upset, and I’m not going to be able to act happy or excited around them. And the same if Trump wins, I’ll be upset. So I think there may be some tension afterward, but we’ll all be glad that it’s over with.”