POLITICS AND NUTRITION – AT 1:22 P.M. ET:   Yes, there is a relationship.  The true scholars among Urgent Agenda readers will appreciate this deep research.  From The Dallas News: 

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.

COMMENTS:  Absolutely fascinating.  Doesn't it kinda confirm what many of us have thought – that politics affects choices we make that have nothing to do with politics?

So, start checking registration statistics for the place you'll be tomorrow.  Travel accordingly.

November 21, 2018