Thanksgiving 2017 Won’t Be Ruined By Political Squabbles: Poll

If you're thinking of bailing on Thanksgiving dinner at your liberal or conservative relative’s house because you just don’t want to hear it, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll offers a glimmer of hope that it won't be a big political fight over turkey and mashed potatoes after all: Nearly a third of adults say they’re not going to talk about politics.

That’s a lot to be thankful for after a year of hard rhetoric that has widened gaps in the nation’s political cleavages. The poll suggests Americans want to get through the Thanksgiving and December holidays without squabbling with their relatives.

That didn’t happen last Thanksgiving after a bitter presidential election campaign left people on both sides feeling psychologically bruised and battered. Conclusions in a pair of researchers’ working paper published earlier this week found that “politically divided” families cut their Thanksgiving gatherings short by about half an hour, compared with the amount of time they spent together on previous Thanksgiving holidays.

Americans may be ready to reclaim Thanksgiving from the political sewer, the Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests.

A majority of the 1,595 U.S. adults surveyed rated politics among their “least favorite” topics to bring up at holiday gatherings, and half said they don’t expect to talk about politics at all this year. The majority of them would rather talk about almost anything else — religion, even their personal finances — than politics, though 21 percent said they will talk about politics, even if it sparks arguments.

Adrianne Beal, a 77-year-old supporter of President Trump from Bolingbrook, Illinois, told Reuters she will shut down Thanksgiving political talk with “a look from the other side of the table” and send a silent message to “change the subject.”

Beal put her foot down on political talk after the 2008 election, when a niece accused her of being a bigot because she didn’t vote for the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama.

“Well, that was the end of that,” Beal told Reuters. “I decided I’m not going to talk politics anymore. I’m not those things they call me.”

Those are the kinds of conversations that can make a Thanksgiving gathering so politically toxic that people want to avoid them. But do they?

Researchers M. Keith Chen of UCLA and Ryme Rohla of Washington State University decided to see if Americans followed through on what amounted to threats to cancel Thanksgiving after the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported.

Their conclusion: Political divides cost families 62 million hours of Thanksgiving face-time last year.

The study matched location data on 10 million smartphones to precinct-level voting data to determine political leanings of the people in the study area. Some 17 trillion markers were collected from the smartphones to plot where families lived and voted, their location on Thanksgiving Day, and what time they arrived and left their destination.

Chen and Rohla found Americans were more likely to linger at homes of the politically like-minded and that “families that were likely to have voted differently spent between 20 or 30 few minutes with each other.” People cut out early in areas with more political ad saturation, they said, and Republicans were more likely to duck out early from gatherings with Democratic families than vice-versa.

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