When it’s all said and done, America will spend roughly $3 billion on Thanksgiving dinners this year — 50 percent of it on turkeys alone.
That’s a whole lot of white meat and cranberry sauce — not to mention the food comas. The $3 billion doesn’t even account for the billions more spent on Thanksgiving-themed advertising or the many billions spent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. All in all, we’re talking well more than $20 billion spent by advertisers and their customers in a sliver of late November.
Despite the occasional outcry against the commercialization of a sentimental family holiday, no one seriously speaks out against corporate ads about the turkey sale at the Albertsons, Kmart’s Black Friday specials or Dallas Cowboy promos for Thanksgiving football.
As Americans, we accept corporate advertising as a way of life in a free-market economy. Why? Because we know there’s a choice: No matter how slickly produced the commercial, we ultimately buy what we want. That Tofurky ad isn’t forcing you to toss your turducken, is it?
But when it comes to our elections, the anti-speech movement to censor political ads grows shriller by the day. Yet we spend far less to advertise political messages than we do on Thanksgiving. The U.S. electoral system is considerably less flush with cash than your typical holiday season. Election 2016’s final price tag — the most expensive of all time — came out to no more than $7 billion.
Election 2018 was even cheaper. The 2017-2018 election cycle — the most expensive midterm ever — cost a mere $5 billion over two years, a drop in the ocean compared with America’s Turkey Day shopping sprees.
But you wouldn’t know it listening to the left. Leading up to Election Day, anti-Trump Democrats made it a mission to criticize our campaign finance system, screaming and shouting to “get money out of politics.”…
