The Ranker Guide to Thanksgiving Dinner Political Conversation
Dreading yet another shouting match with your extended family? We’ve got data on the political issues that your relatives will probably agree on — and the ones that are most likely to start a food fight.
Tired of fighting with your relatives about politics every year? What if we told you that, instead of spending another Thanksgiving yelling at your Flat-Earther aunt from across the dinner table, you could be enjoying a normal, conflict-free holiday? We’ve gathered data from tens of thousands of Ranker voters to figure out which political issues people see as most important, and therefore, are most likely to feel passionately about. With some qualitative analysis and a little common sense, we’ve created a cheat sheet that will help you blaze a path through Thanksgiving dinner that steers clear of treacherous political pitfalls and dangerous inter-uncle conflicts.
Here are the political topics that are most likely to rile up your relatives this year, whether it’s your college-aged cousin who says he’s “Maoist” now, or your grandpa who has watched too much Fox News and is now afraid to leave Florida. We’ve also found the political subjects that are less likely to stir up trouble, allowing you to enjoy a normal, relatively low-volume dinner — at least until it’s time to decide who’s on dishwashing duty.
How We Did It
So how do we know which topics are too touchy and which ones aren’t? To get a sense of what animates people the most politically, we gathered data from our list, “The Social Issues You Care About Most,” which has over 300,000 votes from 40,000 Ranker visitors. The way we interpret votes for a given issue depends on how the issue is phrased: for instance, caring about “abortion” could indicate either that you are either pro-choice or pro-life. For other topics, such as “police brutality,” a downvote is more likely to indicate a political stance — in this case, that you don’t think police brutality is a problem. We examined each issue on a case-by-case basis to find the topics that are most likely to cause disagreement, as well as the ones on which people tend to either agree or not care about.
Since Thanksgiving usually involves people coming together from different generations and different parts of the country, we mostly focused on political differences across age and location. The age brackets we looked at included Zoomers and Millennials (18-38 year olds), Generation X (38-58), and Baby Boomers (58 and up).
TOPICS TO AVOID THIS THANKSGIVING
First off, let’s talk about the subjects that are most likely to set your family off this year — if you hear anyone mention any of these topics, do your best to quickly change the subject to literally anything else.
Abortion
This one should be a no-brainer. Our data says that feelings about abortion are strongest among millennials, which makes sense when you consider that the majority of people who actually procure legal abortion procedures are women in their 20s, according to the CDC. The debate surrounding abortion has been reinvigorated by the addition of conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who have indicated they would be willing to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. If there was ever a time to sound off about Planned Parenthood to your extended family, now is not it.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
TL;DR: If you are an older man with an opinion about abortion, consider keeping it to yourself this Thanksgiving.
Photo: REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Immigration/Terrorism
These are two of the primary issues currently motivating conservative voters, who skew older and more male. These topics have blended together somewhat in our national discourse in recent years, with the Trump administration insisting that stronger immigration controls are needed to prevent domestic terrorism. Given all this, along with the fact that they’re the respective second and third most important issues on our list for baby boomers, we can infer that it’s older, more conservative people who are most animated about these topics.
TL;DR: If you want to avoid a big dinnertime argument with your parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles, try to avoid topics like ISIS and the border wall.
Gender Equality
Age has surprisingly little impact on the importance we place on gender equality, with all age groups placing it somewhere below halfway (between 24th and 28th) on their list of priorities. Geographic region doesn’t tell us much either — take a look at this heat map and you’ll see that people across the country are more or less split down the middle on this topic. Where red represents the percentage of upvotes for “Gender Equality” (“I think this topic matters a lot”) and blue represents percentage of downvotes (“I don’t think this topic is important”), virtually every state for which we have data is somewhere in the center.
Photo: Ranker
The bottom line is that Ranker voters almost everywhere gave “Gender Equality” a similar number of upvotes and downvotes. For some issues, a downvote can be value-neutral; e.g. downvoting “Stem Cell Research” does not imply that you have a position on whether stem cell research is ethical. Voting down “Gender Equality,” however, implies that you either don’t think inequality between genders exists, or that it does exist and is not an important problem — both of which represent political positions of some kind. Therefore, an equal number of upvotes and downvotes across demographics suggests that people in general are both engaged with and opinionated about this issue.
TL;DR: No matter who’s coming to Thanksgiving dinner, bringing up gender politics is likely to make someone upset.
TOPICS THAT ARE SAFE FOR DINNERTIME DISCUSSION
So you’ve run out of things to talk about. You’ve covered sports. You’ve asked how every single cousin you know of is doing. What now?
Ineffective Government
Broad dissatisfaction with the government in general is at or near the top for nearly every demographic who voted on our list. That’s consistent with Gallup data, which suggests that “government, poor leadership, or politicians” has been the country’s dominant problem in the eyes of citizens since at least 2001 (dissatisfaction reached an all-time high in February 2019).
So why is this so consistently cited as a problem? It’s probably because it’s vague and can be easily adopted by people of any political persuasion, making it one of those rare topics on which there is some bipartisan consensus. Sure, you and your weird cousin may have completely different ideas of what specific parts of the government are specifically doing wrong, but you can gloss over those differences with some unfocused criticism of “the whole damn system.”
Photo: Pixabay
TL;DR: If you sense the conversation veering into contentious territory, try shifting the blame to nebulous concepts like “the government” or “corruption.”
Healthcare Reform
Photo: Unsplash
Healthcare has been a hot button issue in our political discourse for at least a decade, first sparked by President Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, and then once more over the Medicare For All proposals that have been popularized by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Our data indicates it’s a priority for Ranker readers across all generations. Again, getting too deep into specifics will likely take the Thanksgiving conversation in a bad direction (stop as soon as you hear “communism”). But almost everyone in this country has had a negative experience trying to treat a condition or injury without paying an arm and a leg for it, so it should be relatively safe to talk about dysfunction in our current healthcare system.
TL;DR: There’s nothing that unites people more than the sinking feeling that comes with a big hospital bill. Unless, of course, you’re from Canada, Sweden, Finland, the U.K., France, Australia…
Education
Photo: Ranker
It’s hard to take a stance against an idea like “the children are our future.” As the heat map above indicates (again, red represents upvotes for “Education” on our list), education is cited as an important topic by people from all across the country. Of course, just because we agree that education is an important issue doesn’t mean we have a strong sense of exactly what, if anything, needs to be done in order to improve our public education system. But you can’t go wrong with an argument for higher teacher pay, more scholarship opportunities, and lower college tuition costs.
TL;DR: Next to maybe the weather, education is probably the safest possible topic for a Thanksgiving dinner discussion.
DON’T GET THEM STARTED ON…
MILLENNIALS:
Photo: Unsplash
Abortion
Police Brutality
Pollution
GENERATION X
Homelessness
Affordable Housing
Campaign Finance Reform
Photo: Unsplash
BABY BOOMERS
Photo: Reuters
Terrorism
Immigration
Moral Decline
STATE BY STATE
Take a look at the map below to find out which political issues matter most to people all across the U.S. The percentages below represent the likelihood that a person in that state cares about a given issue relative to the average voter. For example, if people in Montana are 455% more likely to vote up “Climate Change,” that means that a person who lives in Montana is 4.55 times more likely to vote up that issue than someone who does not live in Montana. If Indiana is 4,323% more likely to vote up “Civil Rights,” that means the likelihood that they care about this issue is 43.23 times higher than it is for the average person.
Photo: Ranker