In this divisive election season, going grocery shopping is something of a happy respite from all the rhetoric. There are no political ads, nobody asking for your vote or disparaging the other side, and you can take a break from reading your friends’ political rants on Facebook, to stroll up and down the aisles and forget about it all for a while.
But that person using coupons in front of you in the checkout line? Probably a Donald Trump supporter. The shopper who’s happily paying full price? They must be planning to vote for Hillary Clinton.
So much for keeping politics out of the grocery store.
It’s an awfully big generalization, of course – especially if you support a different candidate than the above description suggests – but a new survey comes to the unusual conclusion that Trump supporters use more coupons than Clinton backers.
That’s according to Opportunity Consumer Research, an independent educational organization that pledges to “increase the knowledge and understanding of issues, policies, products, and services of concern to consumers”. In an online poll of just over 1,000 American voters, the group found a curious split between supporters of each presidential candidate when it comes to coupon use.
Trump supporters who responded to the poll reported using an average of 4.9 coupons or promo codes in the previous month, compared to Clinton supporters’ use of 3.2 coupons over the same period.
Do Clinton voters have more money to spend? Are Trump supporters more careful with the money they have?
The survey takers offer a simpler explanation – it has more to do with age than savvy shopping, they say.
They found that voters aged 65 and older chose Trump over Clinton, 56% to 44%. All other age groups in the poll favored Clinton. “Not surprisingly, the older demographic that supports Trump is also the exact group that tends to use more coupons,” the researchers conclude.
It’s a somewhat simplistic logical leap – old people like coupons, old people like Trump, therefore Trump supporters like coupons. There’s no lack of detailed demographic data about coupon users, and certainly no lack of polling about every aspect of the upcoming election. So a pseudo-scientific online survey with a small sample size and only a few questions doesn’t amount to much.
But it’s good for a brief distraction from the combative campaign as it enters the home stretch. And in just two and a half weeks, we can all go back to grocery shopping again without concern that our couponing – or lack thereof – will be construed as a political statement.
Image sources: hillaryclinton.com / donaldjtrump.com
