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Public Policy Polling (PPP) is out this week with a new survey that untangles some of the tortured politics of holiday greetings. The firm asked 1,224 voters whether they preferred “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.” Some of the findings turn the politics of “Merry Christmas” on its head.

Only 9 percent of Americans preferred the nondenominational greeting, vs. 45 percent who prefer a traditional “Merry Christmas." (46 percent said they didn't care.)

Only 3 percent of respondents said they'd be personally offended if somebody said “Merry Christmas” to them. But 13 percent said “Happy Holidays” would be offensive to them.

So, individuals who opt for the more inclusive, nondenominational “Happy Holidays” may end up offending more people than if they'd just said “Merry Christmas” in the first place.

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Interestingly, the demographic groups most offended by “Happy Holidays” include strong conservatives (21 percent), Gary Johnson voters (20 percent), Trump supporters (18 percent) and all men (18 percent). These are the same groups of people that tend to say there is too much political correctness in society, yielding a paradox: The folks who complain the most about political correctness are the ones who are the most offended by what they see as “incorrect” speech.

To frame it another way, conservatives often caricature liberals as too quick to take offense over politically incorrect speech. But in the PPP poll, people who described themselves as “very conservative” were more than twice as likely to be offended by “Happy Holidays” (21 percent) as “very liberal” respondents were to be offended by “Merry Christmas” (10 percent).

Again, the thing to keep in mind here is that the outrage and offense-taking is happening primarily within a small contingent of die-hard ideologues on both sides: Over 80 percent of Americans aren't offended by either holiday greeting. Only a third of voters believe that there's any “war on Christmas” at all, according to PPP's poll. To the extent that such a war exists, it's being fought by committed partisans at the margins of the parties.

Trump's repeated invocations of the Christmas conflict suggest that he's trying to make it a more mainstream issue within his coalition. But the polling suggests he's facing an uphill battle. In 2012, for instance, PPP found that 68 percent of Republicans believed there was a “war on Christmas.”