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Ohio Bakery Has a Secret Strategy for Predicting Election Winner...Here's Who's in the Lead

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  October 21, 2020 5:15 PM

The vast majority of polls in 2016 were notoriously wrong in their predictions about whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would pull off a victory, but one cookie company in Ohio wasn’t—and it hasn’t been for the last nine presidential elections.

For more than 30 years, the Busken Bakery chain out of Cincinnati, Ohio, has been conducting its own presidential election surveys in the form of cookie sales.

This year’s matchup comes in the form of two types of cookies, a blue one with a caricature of Joe Biden and a red one of President Trump. The three stores in the area call it their 2020 Presidential Cookie Poll: Follow Your Gut. As of Monday, Trump was ahead 8,439 to Biden’s 7,052.

"The funny thing is they don't necessarily realize that this is them placing their vote and so they'll get the opposite side as a joke for their friends and I'll be like, 'You do realize this is counting towards your vote,' and they're like 'Oh, no' and then they'll switch it back," Hyde Park Busken manager Joshua Stayton told WVXU.

The sweet polling strategy has correctly predicted the presidential election winner since 1984, the bakery’s president Dan Busken said.

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So while President Trump may be trailing Biden by an average of 7.9 percentage points in national surveys, according to RealClearPolitics, perhaps voters ought to look at scientifically dubious, though apparently more reliable, projections like Busken Bakery's.