Measuring the effects of partisanship on pie-eating

By THE DATA TEAM

THANKSGIVING is supposed to be a time for families to gather together, forget their differences and feast on turkey and pumpkin pie. The American Automobile Association expects 51m people to travel at least 50 miles to do so. With this in mind The Economist has created a pumpkin-pie pilgrimage index, a measure of how far people are prepared to go to celebrate Thanksgiving. Our index uses numbers provided by Teralytics, a Zurich-based startup that tracks people’s movements anonymously, sifting through data collected by mobile-phone masts. Using county-level data for a seven-day period over Thanksgiving 2016, we calculated distance travelled, journey time and the duration of stay.

The average American who celebrated Thanksgiving outside their home county left home at 3:40pm on Wednesday, travelled for 300 miles, arrived six hours later at their destination and then stayed for nearly three days. Unsurprisingly, people from counties whose residents travel the farthest tend to stay longer. Nonetheless there is still vast variation between counties. We grouped distance travelled, journey time and duration of stay together into an equally weighted index to rank the counties where people travel farthest and stay longest. Clallam county near Seattle comes top. Its residents travel 1,200 miles on average and stay for four days at their destination. At the other end of the scale is Macoupin county in Illinois, whose residents travel just 100 miles and stay for just 42 hours, on average.

What lies behind these vast differences? Every $10,000 increase in a county’s median income increases the distance that its residents travel for Thanksgiving, on average, by 35 miles. And the more educated a county’s residents, the more likely they are to travel. What about politics? Could partisanship after last year’s divisive presidential election have affected people’s Thanksgiving plans in 2016? It seems so. Residents of Democratic counties who travelled to less Democratic places were more likely to shorten their stays. People from Republican counties who went to less Republican ones, by contrast, were more likely to stay for longer.