Election disagreements carved up families’ holidays, study shows

Analysis: Many stayed apart more that Thanksgiving

LOS ANGELES — 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 dinners hosted in Trump precincts, the analysis found.

The more that visitors were exposed to campaign commercials in the months before the election, the less time they spent at crosspartisan 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 a recent edition of the journal Science.

The pair came up with a name for this political and holiday dysfunction — the “Thanksgiving effect.”

Chen and Rohla cited anecdotal evidence that many Americans called off Thanksgiving plans with “politically problematic relatives” in the wake of the unusually divisive election. It made them wonder whether they could demonstrate this empirically, and perhaps even quantify it.

They started with anonymized data from more than 10 million smartphones. The “pings” from the phones between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. in the weeks before Thanksgiving told the researchers where each phone user lived, and the pings between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day told them where they went for their holiday meal.

Chen and Rohla crossreferenced those locations with precinct-level voting data from state and county election officials around the country. 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 were at home in the morning and at night on Thanksgiving, but who went somewhere else for dinner.

Among these Americans, the average length of Thanksgiving dinner was 4 hours and 17 minutes, according to the study. About 44 percent of dinners were cross-partisan gatherings.

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 traveled to Trump precincts, they stayed for 20 to 40 fewer minutes than the national average.