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.
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,........