Keep your elbows, politics off the table
Poll finds many want to avoid national affairs
WASHINGTON — Pass the turkey — but maybe hold the politics. The already-fraught topic now includes allegations of sexual misconduct against politicians of various political stripes.
From GOP President Donald Trump to Democratic Sen. Al Franken, politicians past, present and aspiring stand accused of sexual misconduct, and that could keep tensions high at the holiday table. More than a third of Americans dread the prospect of politics coming up over Thanksgiving, a new poll shows.
Glenn Rogers, a Republican from Los Angeles, says he asks people around the table to talk about things to celebrate from the past year. Not everyone, he knows, will be toasting the Trump presidency.
“For the most part, we get to the point where we know that we’re not going to agree with each other and it gets dropped,” says the 67-year-old manufacturing consultant, who says he voted less for Trump than against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Rogers is among more than a third of Americans who say they dread the prospect of politics coming up over Thanksgiving, compared with just 2 in 10 who say they’re eager to talk politics, according to a new poll by the Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Four in 10 don’t feel strongly either way.
Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to say they’re uneasy about political discussions at the table, 39 percent to 33 percent. And women are more likely than men to say they dread the thought of talking politics, 41 percent to 31 percent.
Those who do think there’s at least some possibility of politics coming up are somewhat more likely to feel optimistic about it than Americans as a whole. Among this group, 30 percent say they’d be eager to talk politics and 34 percent would dread it.
The debate over whether to talk politics at Thanksgiving is about as American as the traditional feast itself. By Christmas 2016, 39 percent of U.S. adults said their families avoided conversations about politics, according to the Pew Research Center.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,070 adults was conducted Nov. 15-19 using a sample drawn from NORC’S probability-based Amerispeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later interviewed online or by phone.