The 2016 election cut Thanksgiving dinners short; will the 2018 election do the same?

Study shows some travelers cut the holiday short due to differing views

If your relatives make a quick escape from the dinner table this Thanksgiving, it may not be because you served them dry turkey and lumpy mashed potatoes.

A recent study determined that some travelers cut their Thanksgiving dinner short when they were spending it in a place that voted differently than where they lived – effectively avoiding dinner discussions about the presidential election.

In “The Effect of Partisanship and Political Advertising on Close Family Ties,” researchers Keith Chen and Ryan Rhola gathered location data from smartphones to track holiday travelers’ drives, then matched that to voting data.

The billions of location pings, aggregated in 2015 and 2016 by data-gathering company Safegraph, cover the 77 percent of the U.S. population that uses smartphones. The researchers isolated travelers who spent both Wednesday and Thursday nights in their own homes, avoiding people whose travel plans were constrained by, for instance, airplane tickets.

Chen and Rhola then assessed each location’s political leanings, based on results from the 2016 election. They also compared the results for 2015 and 2016 to control for the difference in years with and without major elections.

Their findings? Thanksgiving travelers who went somewhere with different political leanings from their own shortened their dinners by 30 to 50 minutes compared with those who traveled to districts with similar leanings. Why the difference? Overall, Chen and Rhola estimated that Americans cut out 73.6 million hours of time spent together on Thanksgiving 2016 – 52.2 percent from residents in Republican-leaning precincts and 47.8 percent from Democrat-leaning precincts.

Political advertising exacerbated the difference, according to the study, shortening dinners by 2.6 minutes for every 1,000 political ads in the traveler’s home media market.

This accounted for 15.9 million hours lost, 46.3 percent of which was from residents of Democratic precincts and 53.7 percent from those traveling from Republican precincts. Will 2018 follow? It’s hard to predict whether Thanksgiving 2018 will see similar changes in visit times. But Texas’ relatively close call between 2016 presidential candidates, as well as the sharp divide between urban and border Democratic counties and strongly Republican rural precincts, made it an interesting area for the researchers.

“From that perspective, it’s very representative,” Chen said. “It’s a very informative mix of people.”

Dozens of 2018 ads surrounding the high-profile First lady Melania Trump watches as President Donald Trump pardons “Peas” from South Dakota at the National Thanksgiving Turkey pardoning ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

Senate race attacked the candidates’ stances on taxes, immigration, and standing for the national anthem, raising awareness of the election’s most contentious talking points even among people who didn’t closely follow the arguments.

Texas Democrats flipped at least two congressional seats and spots in the state senate, but Texans chose

Republican Ted Cruz over Democrat Beto O’rourke in one of the most-watched races of the year. Some high-population counties, including Tarrant County, switched from red to blue.

Part of the difficulty of predicting 2018’s dinner times is that the early departures in 2016 didn’t seem planned, according to the study. Of the travelers

who attended Thanksgiving with relatives in both 2015 and 2016, no significant number seemed to change plans in anticipation of potential political arguments, Chen and Rhola said.

Though travelers may head home early after contentious elections, the study shows, they won’t give up on Thanksgiving as a whole.