Ohio Bakery Cookie Sales Indicate Trump Election Victory

Millions of voters across the U.S. are heading out to the polls on Tuesday to vote in the 2024 presidential election and an Ohio bakery has made its own floury forecast.

Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are locked in a virtual dead-heat race to win the White House, with the polls showing an effective toss-up between the two candidates.

But not all of them. In Ohio, one non-traditional forecast is being conducted: the dough-mocracy cookie poll.

Busken Bakery in Cincinnati has been predicting electionsvia cookie sales since 1984, and they've only been wrong once, with the crumble-poll proving accurate in nine out of 10 elections. The poll was wrong in 2020 and predicted a Trump victory.

The bakery sells cookies with the faces of each presidential candidate on them. The cookie that sells the most indicates the winner of the White House.

"In 1984, when [Ronald] Reagan and [Walter] Mondale were presidential candidates, my dad came up with the idea to let Cincinnatians vote with their mouth. He birthed the idea of a cookie poll," Dan Busken of Busken Bakery previously told Newsweek in an email.

"It was so fun that first year that we kept doing it and we couldn't believe the accuracy each election cycle."

Newsweek spoke to Dan Busken on the day of the election. "We're very excited," he said. We're sad to see the cookie sales come to an end, but other than that, we're also looking forward to a decision."

The most recent cookie poll indicated a Trump landslide. 33,881 Trump cookies had sold, while 13,010 Harris cookies had been bought. Asked whether he thinks this is indicative of what the final poll will be, Busken told Newsweek, "I don't think it's going to be a landslide. I think it's going to be much tighter than the cookie poll reflects."

Shortly after the presidential debate on September 21, Trump was leading by 53.9 percent of the cookie poll. The cookie tally was at 2,601 for Trump, and 1,820 for Harris, according to a post on Busken's social media.

The poll went viral after the New York Post reported that Trump was taking the lead. This was then shared by Elon Musk on X, formerly Twitter, and cookie sales soared.

While the candidates were close in cookie numbers before this, sales of the Republican's have been well ahead since the bakery started to make headlines. On September 24, sales were at 2,198 for Harris and 3,006 for Trump. Three days later the former president was ahead by 10,000, with his at 13,433 and Harris' at 3,313.

Since then Harris has been behind in the sales by a significant margin, with her having around 10,000 of her cookies being sold since then, and Trump's selling almost double that.

Busken told Newsweek that, "This is the first election that there's been such a wide gap between two candidates."

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