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U.S.|Here Comes Santa Claus’s Approval Rating
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/us/santa-polls-believe.html
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Despite some debates in the news, Americans’ views on Santa haven’t really changed, polls show. Most parents still say he’ll visit on Christmas Eve.
Kaleigh Rogers has covered polling since 2020 (and still believes).
Dec. 23, 2024, 5:23 p.m. ET
There’s been a vicious rumor going around the last few years that Santa Claus is falling out of fashion among this generation of parents. Some parents have worried on social media (and in advice columns) that furthering the Santa Claus myth with their children amounts to an endorsement of dishonesty, and could even be traumatizing when the truth comes out. Developmental psychologists have studied the debate.
But there’s a long tradition of polling on Saint Nick, and it shows that belief in Santa — and favorability and job approval ratings of the man in red — has been quite steady over the years. Of course, it’s hard to avoid politics in polls, and there’s disagreement over which party Americans think Santa Claus would back. But there’s plenty of consensus on his being real.
On Christmas Eve in 1985, The New York Times ran a front-page article with the results of a Times poll of 261 children ages 3 through 10 that found a whopping 87 percent believed in Santa. Girls and boys, Black children and white children, children from Catholic families and Protestant ones were all equally likely to believe in Santa Claus, The Times reported — as were kids being raised by both Democrats and Republicans.
There was, unsurprisingly, variation by age, with every 3-year-old interviewed expressing belief, but just two-thirds of 10-year-olds. (Parents were asked if their children could be interviewed about Christmas, which may have excluded children of other faiths.)
Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of polling that goes directly to the source on this question — children — since then. Instead, pollsters have tended to ask adults whether they believed as a child, or to ask parents if their children believe, leading to mixed results.
In a 2006 poll from The Associated Press and AOL News, 86 percent of Americans said they believed in Santa as a child, and 60 percent of parents with children at home said Saint Nick was an important part of their holiday celebrations. In 2013, Pew Research Center found that roughly 58 percent of parents of children under 18 said a child in their household believed in Santa — not necessarily an indication of reduced belief, since this group would include older children and teenagers, who tend to disbelieve.
