There have been both contentious and contentious elections before.  U.S. history is full of very nasty campaigns.  During the campaign of 1870, a prominent supporter of the incumbent, John Adams, said that if Thomas Jefferson were to be elected, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution,” and a newspaper in Connecticut opined that the country, under a Jefferson presidency, would be one in which, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”  Adams was described as both a “repulsive pedant” and a “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”  Somehow, compared to that, “nasty woman” seems sort of quaint.