Photo Because of their political differences, Anna Sproul-Latimer and Matt Latimer of Arlington, Va., try not to talk about the presidential race. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
In early May, when Dr. Thomas Stossel told his wife, Dr. Kerry Maguire, of his plan to vote for Donald J. Trump in the general election, she hit him with an ultimatum.
"If you vote for Trump, I will divorce you and move to Canada," she recalled telling him. He tried to laugh it off.
"I'm serious," Dr. Maguire told him.
Before this spat, through nearly 20 years of marriage, politics had never caused much friction between Dr. Maguire, a dentist w ho is the director of the children's outreach program at the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and Dr. Stossel, a hematologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Then came the 2016 presidential campaign. A political season that has made for hot debates in the public arena has also seeped into private lives, complicating friendships, marriages, romances and relationships among family members.
Dr. Maguire, 59, and her husband, 74, have disagreed over politics before, but never like this. During the 2012 presidential campaign, they had two signs planted side by side on their front lawn in Belmont, Mass.: one for her choice, Barack Obama, and the other for his, Mitt Romney.
"Politics were very low on the list of priorities when we met," said Dr. Stossel, whose political ideology made a rightward turn in the 1980s, bringing him more in line with his brother, John Stossel, who hosts "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. "Therapists say you have the best relationships when you are clearly separate people. And I like to think that we are emotionally centered, so that we can have a major disagreement about something and it's not a big problem."
The couple avoided discussing the campaign into the summer, and Dr. Maguire, who said she will vote for Hillary Clinton, fell under the impression that her husband would no longer be supporting Mr. Trump. But in an interview on July 28, Dr. Stossel restated his support for the Republican nominee.
"I'm reasonably convinced that Hillary is handcuffed to the economic progressive populism that has totally taken over the Democratic Party, a.k.a., socialism," said Dr. Stossel, a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "I think that if she gets power and the party gets power, there is a good likelihood that the agendas of that movement will be enacted. To me, that counters what I consider to be what brings us prosperity, which is entrepreneurship."
Wh en asked about Mr. Trump's talk of building a wall along the United States-Mexico border and banning Muslim immigrants, Dr. Stossel said: "I think it is very unlikely that he can pull any of that stuff off. It seems improbable to me, because he still has to work in the constraints of what I hope will be a checks and balances system. Frankly, I don't think he is going to have to make good on a lot of these crazy promises."
In a separate interview later that afternoon, Dr. Maguire seemed unaware of her husband's stance. She sounded confident that Dr. Stossel had been dissuaded from his support by friends, as well as her quasi-threat to leave him. When told by this reporter of her husband's intent to go through with voting for Mr. Trump, she seemed shocked, if not angry.
"That is news to me," D r. Maguire said. "And I'll be calling my attorney."
After a pause, she went on: "I don't think he will vote for him. But if he does, I hope he never tells me about it. For someone who is so reasonable in every other part of his life, and who expects people to have expertise, it doesn't really link with the Tom Stossel that I know.
"I would just be disgusted on every level," she continued. "And also a little fearful. Disgusted on the marriage level, but fearful for our society."
Anna Sproul-Latimer, an agent with the Ross Yoon Literary Agency in Washington, D.C., believed she knew the man she would marry. But that was before politics got in the way.
When she met Matt Latimer in 2008, he was a disaffected former speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. Back then she considered herself something of a Libertarian, although she had supported Mr. Obama's first presidential run.
As the years went by and their relationship deepened, she found that she believed in things such as the Affordable Care Act and began to doubt the ideology of the Libertarian movement. With the Tea Party's insurgency in 2010, she learned that her husband held many Tea Party ideals in high esteem, especially when it came to limited government.
"I loved him and still love him," said Ms. Sproul-Latimer, 31, "but at the same time I had to resist my first insti nct, which was to say, 'Gross.'"
Despite their growing political differences, they went through with the wedding in 2012. Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense for whom Mr. Latimer had worked, attended. Today the couple share views on many social issues, especially when it comes to school choice and rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, but the Clinton-Trump contest has reopened old wounds.
They were especially at odds in the early part of the campaign, when Mr. Trump was a fresh character on the political scene.
Photo Dr. Kerry Maguire and her husband, Dr. Tom Stossel, at home in Belmont, Mass. She plans to vote for Hillary Clinton and threatened to divorce him when he said he backed Donald J. Trump. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
"I loved him when he first ran," said Mr. Latimer, 45, a founding partner of Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm. "I thought he was hilarious. I loved the idea that he would drive everyone insane. I loved that he was pure chaos and total stream of consciousness."
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