Politics
Could a Cup Count Predict the Election Result?
A shop in the Hamptons sells presidential campaign cups. The top seller usually also wins the race.
Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a shop that is once again selling presidential campaign cups and keeping track of the sales numbers. It has done this since 2004, and its final count has been wrong only once — in 2016. We’ll also get details on a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul who is accused of acting as a Chinese agent.
Credit…James Barron/The New York Times
Are you obsessed with polls about the presidential race? Or are you fed up with polls about the presidential race?
Either way, this story is about a somewhat different poll, one short on pollsterisms like “cross-tabulation” and “margin of error.” It comes from a store selling plastic drinking cups with the names of the major-party candidates.
The store, the Monogram Shop in East Hampton, N.Y., has done this since 2004. Its final count — the candidate whose cups sold the most — has failed to mirror the presidential result only once, in 2016.
Will the 2024 cup count mirror the voting? Valerie Smith, the store owner, will find out soon enough. As of Monday, the cups for the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — had outsold those for former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Smith said she had sold 10,782 Harris-Walz cups and 3,583 Trump-Vance ones.
