If the variety of candidate-branded plastic cups offered on the Monogram Store in East Hampton is an correct predictor of the election outcomes this fall, in a Biden-versus-Trump November race, President Biden will get clobbered.
Each presidential election cycle since 2004, the small store on Newtown Lane has offered monogrammed plastic cups with every of the candidates’ names on them, preserving depend of gross sales and posting the every day tally. Except the Clinton-Trump showdown it’s all the time been an ideal indicator of the end result of the race (together with Bush-Kerry).
“It fell aside in 2016 with everybody else,” says Valerie Smith, the store’s proprietor.
In January of this yr, Smith determined to get rid of the cup depend. “It’s such a poisonous setting,” she says. “This might result in one thing disagreeable.”
As an alternative, she took a impartial, quiet method to political messaging and printed “Let Us Pray 2024” on plastic cups that, she says, spoke to everybody. They usually offered “briskly.”
However those that frequented the store needed the temperature-taking candidate cups again, and informed Smith as a lot. Early final month, she caved and made Biden-Harris 2024 and Trump 2024 cups. The gross sales outcomes shocked her, however not almost as a lot as who was shopping for them.
“From the second we began, the gross sales have been three to at least one [for Trump],” Smith says.
“What has been fascinating, with possibly 4 exceptions, [is that] each single one in all these cups has been purchased by a lady. And what does the polling each time inform us? That Trump is in hassle with suburban ladies. Nicely, let me inform you—they’re strolling in right here all day lengthy.”
As of June 30, roughly three weeks into promoting them, 689 Trump cups and 376 Biden cups had been offered (and a few 100 of these Biden cups, Smith notes, have been purchased in bulk forward of the star-studded post-debate native Biden fundraiser final Saturday at Barry and Lizanne Rosenstein’s oceanfront home on Additional Lane). Additionally billed on the invite have been Hamptonites like Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Michael J. Fox.
Now, with many calling for Biden to depart the race following his efficiency within the first presidential debate, the nice cup indicator has been fully thrown for a loop. So have many Democrats, who, together with their checkbooks, spend their summers within the Hamptons.
Like Palm Seaside within the winter and New York Metropolis within the spring, the Hamptons is on the donor circuit, and most politicians roll by between the tip of June and mid-August, hat in hand, tapping the identical rich donors in every place.
The talk final week gave a lot of them pause.
At events over lobster salad and rosé, and on Primary Seaside in East Hampton over dwell music Tuesday, whereas gleeful native Trump supporters have been texting “Bi-Executed” to anybody and everybody, conversations amongst shell-shocked Democrats feeling caught in purgatory swayed between “Biden ought to step apart” and “let him run” to “I’m unsure what he ought to do.”
However behind closed doorways, the place the true cash is pumped into the campaigns, one distinguished fundraiser who requested to not be named says the temper is one in all “real concern.”
Demonstrators maintain indicators exterior of a fundraiser for US President Joe Biden in East Hampton, New York, US, on Saturday, June 29, 2024.By Amanda L. Gordon/Bloomberg through Getty Pictures.
