You already know who they voted for. You have known since the morning after the election, either because they told you or because you could tell from what they did not say. The friendship has continued. What you are navigating now is not whether to continue it but what to do with the knowledge that lives between you.
This is a different question than it appears. It is not really a question about politics. It is a question about what your friendship is made of and whether what it is made of is strong enough to bear the weight of what you disagree about.
Some differences in voting are genuinely manageable — differences in emphasis, in which problem feels most urgent, in predictions about which policies will achieve shared ends. These are policy disagreements. They are real, but they are the kind of thing that can be discussed without one person concluding the other is dangerous. They are disagreements about strategy rather than disagreements about who deserves rights and protection.
Other differences in voting are not policy disagreements. They are disagreements about whether certain people — including sometimes you, or people you love — are fully human and entitled to equal treatment under the law. These are not symmetric disagreements. Treating them as symmetric — as though your difference of opinion about tax rates and their difference of opinion about whether transgender children should receive medical care are equivalent forms of political diversity — is a move that benefits exactly one side. It is worth being honest about which kind of difference you are actually dealing with, rather than using a general framework of political tolerance that was designed for the manageable kind.
This distinction matters for what you decide to do. If the difference is strategic — if you both want, roughly, a just and functional society and disagree about how to produce it — the friendship has real room to work with. You can argue, you can change each other's minds, you can maintain warmth through the disagreement. If the difference is categorical — if one person's vote is, effectively, a vote against the other person's existence or dignity — then the question of what to do with it becomes much heavier, and no amount of shared history makes it lighter.
Even in cases where the difference is categorical, people make different choices. Some maintain the friendship and choose not to discuss politics because the relationship has other dimensions that matter to them. This is a legitimate choice, not necessarily a moral failure, though it requires honesty about what it costs. Some cannot maintain it — not out of inability to tolerate disagreement, but because the specific content of the disagreement lands too close to something they need the friendship to not contain. This is also a legitimate choice. And some stay in the friendship precisely to try to change the friend's mind — knowing the odds, accepting that it might not work, believing that proximity is their best lever. All three are real options. None is obviously right.
What is worth examining is the reasoning behind whichever choice you make. If you maintain the friendship to avoid conflict, you are choosing comfort. If you maintain it because you genuinely value what the relationship contains beyond the political difference, and you are willing to hold the dissonance, that is a more honest position. If you end the friendship to signal virtue rather than because the relationship has actually become untenable, that is a different kind of dishonesty. Clarity about motivation is not accusatory; it is practical. It tells you what kind of decision you are actually making.
The friendships that survive political divergence, in the cases I find most credible, do not survive by avoiding the subject. They survive because the two people involved have developed the capacity to talk about the disagreement directly without needing the other person to capitulate. This requires holding, simultaneously: I believe you are wrong about this, and I am not willing to end the relationship over it, and I am still curious about why you believe what you believe. This is not comfortable. It is not designed to be. The discomfort is the evidence that you are taking both the friendship and the disagreement seriously.
There is a risk in the middle path that should be named. Maintaining a friendship with someone whose vote directly harms marginalized people requires that you not make that friendship invisible to those people. If your friend voted to restrict rights and you are continuing the friendship, and you also have other friends whose rights were restricted by that vote, you cannot ask those friends to absorb the knowledge of your choice without acknowledging the weight of what you are asking them to hold. Your political tolerance is real. Their exposure to its consequences is also real. These coexist.
Ultimately, what the friendship that voted differently asks of you is not uncritical acceptance. It asks for an honest accounting: of what the friendship is actually worth, of what the disagreement actually means, and of whether the version of the friendship that can survive the divergence is still the friendship you want. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. The measure is not whether you can tolerate disagreement in the abstract. It is whether this specific friendship, with this specific person, about this specific difference, has enough substance to justify the difficulty of remaining.