Politics and family feel more fraught this Thanksgiving. Data shows they are

This year’s election split voters down the middle. Now, as the nation sets the table for the winter holidays, it’s doing the same thing to families.

||| FROM USA TODAY |||

Thanks to his years as a political commentator and program host on Fox News, Jesse Watters is one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most-recognized boosters. Finally, that became too much for his mother, Anne Watters: A few days after Trump became president-elect, Watters told the world his mom disinvited him for Thanksgiving.

This year’s election split voters down the middle. Now, as the nation sets the table for the winter holidays, it’s doing the same thing to families.

As a psychologist who specializes in family estrangement and a national public opinion researcher, we’ve been detecting a rise in affective polarization for a while, with once-close families and friends limiting or ending contact over politics. Political affiliation, in fact, has become the most significant factor in determining whom people choose to connect with or exclude, surpassing religion, race, ethnicity, gender and other common fault lines.

To more closely investigate the divisive effect of politics on family and friends, we collaborated on a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults shortly after Election Day. We asked them whether politics has altered their relationships with family and friends and, if so, whether they have limited or even severed contact as a result. We also asked them what could bring them back together.

In addition, we reached out to clients working through estrangement to share their stories.

Here’s what we found.

Estranged from family over politics? Polls show you’re not alone.

Today, 1 in 2 adults are estranged from a close relation. Though the main explanation for such ruptures is something that a relative said or did, about 2 in 5 attribute it directly to political differences. Of those estranged over politics, almost half say the break occurred within the past year, with 1 in 7 saying it happened in just the past month.

Their disassociations include cutting off all contact, even through intermediaries and blocking them on social media.  

Many of those in intact families also sense the poisoning power of politics in their own close relationships. A third of American adults say they’ve felt uncomfortable at a family gathering over the past year due to a relative’s political beliefs. A third worry, too, that political arguments will darken upcoming family gatherings.

There’s not much difference in the frequency of estrangement by political beliefs or party affiliation, with liberals (21%) and conservatives (20%) experiencing it slightly more often than moderates (14%).

Tolstoy famously told us that all unhappy families are unique, but from years of counseling families, we can say the pain that precedes a fracture and the pain that follows are things they often have in common.

A self-described “gay son of a Southern Baptist preacher,” Jonathan Simcosky explained his decision to break ties with his father: Though he disagreed with his father’s viewpoints when he was young, Simcosky said, he could respect his father’s “noble pursuit of moral purity” that underpinned them, only to see him back President-elect Donald Trump: “If we can’t agree that Donald Trump is uniquely unfit, I don’t see how we could ever agree on anything meaningful. In short, I now no longer feel I can trust or respect my parents.” 

A retired police officer and Trump supporter wrote to us about his estrangement from his liberal son and his wife over politics. He said that he voted for Trump every time he ran, but that his son and daughter-in-law said because he was a fan of Trump, they were no fans of his and cut him off – including access to his grandchild.

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