It may be irritating to wake up the day after Thanksgiving to find Christmas music jingling on virtually every radio station, but it hardly compares to the annoyance of listening to politicians months before heading to the polls, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds.
Eighty-one percent of Americans would rather hear Christmas music than campaign ads, according to the survey, while just 7 percent would prefer the commercials.
Maybe that's a low bar to clear. But despite the annual wave of grinching that tends to accompany the start of Christmas Music Season, most Americans at least kind of enjoy the festivity. Just 17 percent say they're not at all looking forward to hearing Christmas music, while a 55 percent majority are similarly unenthused to hearing commercials for next year's election.
"Christmas creep" -- the phenomenon of celebrations starting as early as Halloween -- may be wearing on Americans' nerves. Just 4 percent want to hear Christmas music more than a month before the holiday, but 17 percent are willing to listen to campaign ads more than a month before the election.
Oddly, campaign ads actually prove to be the less polarizing of the two subjects.
Republicans, most of whom would be happy to listen to a solid month of Christmas music, are 16 points more likely than Democrats to look forward "a lot" to the first strains of sleigh bells.
Members of both parties, though, are about equally unenthusiastic about hearing campaign ads, with political independents even more apathetic. Seventeen percent of Republicans, 21 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of independents say that, if they were allowed to choose, stations would never start airing campaign ads.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Nov. 25-30 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls' methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
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