Personally, I didn’t need a poll to tell me this.

The new Gallup poll shows 77 percent of Americans think the U.S. is divided after a contentious presidential campaign, while only 21 percent believe it is united and in agreement.

That is a new high for the Gallup poll. Over the past 20 years, the public has tended to perceive the nation as being more divided than united, apart from two surveys taken after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The new poll shows that Republicans are less likely to believe the U.S. is divided while Democrats are more likely to think so.

Did they poll any realists?

We’ve just gone through eight years of a president who has actually made “Us versus Them” the staple of his administration.

“Us” being fringe leftist groups, Democrats, and assorted reprobates, and “Them” being anybody with a more traditional view of the world.

When President Obama said, “We won. Get over it,” to Republicans, he drew lines of separation.

When he told Republicans to “sit down and shut up,” he deepened those lines.

When Democrats physically locked Republicans out of meetings on important issues and rammed through destructive policies, like the horrendous Obamacare, they didn’t just raise the drawbridge. They set it on fire.

Still, this current poll is very much centered around the past election and how the nation feels about the incoming administration.

The new poll also shows Americans are split almost evenly on whether they think President-elect Donald Trump will unite or divide the country.

While 45 percent say Trump will unite the country, 49 percent say he will do more to divide it.

These views fall along party lines, with 88 percent of Republicans saying Trump will do more to unite the country and 81 percent of Democrats saying he will divide it.

This tends to be the trend after elections, while there is uncertainty about how a new administration will proceed.

My fear is that after eight years of Obama, where we’ve watched a childish, petulant fool go out of his way to create friction among our citizens and suspicion of authority, we’re welcoming in a new kind of clod, who will take us in an entirely new, but equally destructive direction.

I hope I’m wrong, and I’m perfectly willing to take a wait-and-see approach.

If I’m right, however, I hope everybody has invested in asbestos undies, because where Obama poured the gasoline, Trump may be introducing the match.