Family row is not the natural side dish to turkey, says America 2024
I looked at the YouGov poll for this week’s Economist newspaper and came away with the notion of America 2024 as a giant overflowing with – turkey, trimmings and tonnes of goodwill.
Just to be clear, The Economist set out, in its words, “to investigate the cliché that the natural side-dish to turkey is a heated family argument”.
The poll found that more than three in five respondents said they did not expect a quarrel over politics. Only 14 per cent said they expected a fight and a fraction more of those doomsayers were Democrats. The most interesting finding, however, was this: “independents were more likely to forgo celebrating altogether than those who identified with one party or the other”.
Okay, so it starts to make a bit of sense. Perhaps America isn’t as polarised now down party lines as it is divided by hopes and fears.
In past years, repeated polling has found higher and higher levels of animosity between people who support one political side or the other.
In 2016, for instance, a Pew Research Center poll found that the proportion of Republicans and Democrats who reported “very unfavourable” feelings towards members of the other party had climbed to more than one half over a nearly 25-year period. In 1992, it used to be around one in five.
Research conducted by Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla of the Universities of California and Washington State right round the Thanksgiving period in 2016 (when Hillary Clinton had just lost the election to Donald Trump) found that politics may have left its own aftertaste. After an elaborate exercise in pinpointing data for a precinct’s Republican and Democratic vote share and calculating the likelihood that Thanksgiving dinner guests had voted for a different presidential candidate than the hosts, they looked at how long the guests stayed at the party. The 2016 festive meal, they found, was a shorter by at least half-an-hour when mixed groups of voters were involved.
This year, perhaps not so much, if you go by the YouGov poll for this week’s Economist newspaper. Could it mean the fever of active political dislike of the political ‘other’ is starting to break, just a little?
