The pastry lovers of the US succeeded this month where the political pundits and public opinion pollsters failed. Intermountain Jewish News readers got a taste of the cookie politics before the election.
A three-month old promotion sponsored by Three Brothers Bakery, the most-prominent Jewish bakery in the Greater Houston area, offered customers the choice of buying cookies decorated with the likenesses of presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris, to show the customers’ voting preferences. The final sales total — including those cookies shipped outside of southeast Texas and at the bakery’s four Houston-area locations — gave Trump a strong lead, by 5,228 cookies to 4,447.
In other words, the Three Brothers customers indicated that the GOP candidate would beat the Democratic nominee.
Which many political experts and pollsters failed to do; in the days before the Nov. 5 election, most authorities predicted a razor-thin triumph for Harris, or a “dead heat.”
The cookie poll “is just something fun to do to lower the stress,” said Janice Jucker, the fifth-generation co-owner of the business (threebrothersbakery.com) founded by a trio of Holocaust survivors. “We actually got it right for the first time.”
As noted in the IJN report on the business’ now-established election year sales effort, in past years the cookie prediction failed to reflect the eventual result of the final vote for president.
“The funny thing is the Trump cookies are flying out the door,” Jucker told the IJN. “We’re wondering if we’re going to see a demand all year long.”
