How the 2016 U.S. election affected Thanksgiving dinner
The 2016 presidential election was so toxic that Americans spent nearly 74 million fewer hours with family and friends on Thanksgiving Day, new research suggests.
More than 48 million hours were lost when Thanksgiving guests from precincts that voted for Republican Donald Trump cut short their visits to hosts in precincts that went for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Another 35 million hours were lost when visitors from Clinton precincts arrived late or departed early from dinner hosted in Trump precincts, the analysis found.
And the more that visitors were exposed to campaign commercials in the months before the election, the less time they spent at cross-partisan Thanksgiving gatherings a few weeks after Election Day.
“Our results indicate that partisan polarization extends in quantitatively meaningful ways to close family settings and that political advertising and related campaign efforts can exacerbate these fissures,” economists M. Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla wrote in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
The pair named this dysfunction — the “Thanksgiving effect.” Chen and Rohla cited anecdotal evidence that many Americans called off Thanksgiving plans with “politically problematic relatives” after the divisive election. It made them wonder whether they could demonstrate this and quantify it.
They started with anonymized data from more than10 million smartphones. The “pings” from the phones told the researchers where each phone user lived, andwhere they went for their holiday meal. Chen and Rohla cross-refer- enced those locations with precinct-level voting data. The phone users were presumed to have voted the way their precincts as a whole voted.
Then the researchers narrowed their focus to the phone users who went somewhere else for dinner.
The phone data revealed that guests from Trump precincts who dined in Clinton precincts spent 50 to 70 fewer minutes at their holiday meals compared to the national average. When guests from Clinton precincts travelled to Trump precincts, they stayed for 20 to 40 fewer minutes.