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.
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.
Smith is careful not to overanalyze the cup count. She called it “a barometer of enthusiasm,” and the store’s website says the tally is not about democracy. “It’s just a cup count,” the website says.
But like a poll, the cup count is based on a random sample — whoever walks into the store and buys a cup. It is skewed toward the extremely wealthy — day trippers, weekenders and fun-seekers in one of the most expensive places in the country. The median household income in East Hampton is $122,763 a year, almost 50 percent more than the national average.
The results can also be skewed another way: when one customer buys more than one cup.
But for Smith, the only margin of error is whether she has enough cups in stock.
That was an issue after President Biden dropped out of the race in late July. “I took a guess and ordered 800” cups for Harris, “not knowing whether she would be a hit or a miss,” Smith said.
All 800 were gone in little more than a day. “My own opinion is that it was less about her personally than about exuberant relief that Biden had stepped aside,” Smith said.
In July, Trump cups had outsold Biden’s some days by a three-to-one rate or even four to one. On July 21, the day Biden announced that he was abandoning his candidacy, the count was 98 for Trump to 22 for Biden. Since the Harris-Walz cups came in, they have outsold Trump-Vance cups by roughly three to one.
This is the sixth time Smith has conducted a cup count. She started selling cups in 2004, when the Democrats nominated John Kerry to run against President George W. Bush. The price of each cup was $3, the same as it is now.
In 2016, Trump led the cup count until mid-July, when Hillary Clinton pulled ahead. The day before Election Day, the cup-count winner was Clinton with 5,123, to Trump’s 3,424.
This time around, Smith hesitated about doing a cup count “because of the inflammatory atmosphere.”
“In February I printed cups that said ‘Let us pray 2024,’” she said. “Those sold nicely. But a number of people came in and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re not going to do the cup count,’ and so I did it.”
Smith is carefully nonpartisan about the cup count. But she knows what she sees from behind the counter.
“The polling tells us his support is very soft with women,” Smith said of Trump. “I’m here to tell the pollsters it’s not. Mostly the visitors to the store are women, no question about it, but during the last go-round” — in 2020 — “a lot of men came in off the sidewalk and bought Trump cups — a noticeable number of men were in the store who would not be normally.”
She added: “Now it’s almost entirely women.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day with high temperatures in the upper 70s. Temperatures will drop to the low 60s overnight under a mostly clear sky.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
The latest New York news
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A surprise for seniors at Cooper Union: Their tuition will be free this year, thanks to a $6 million gift from three alumni. After more than a century of free tuition, Cooper Union began charging students in 2013, though it plans to return to free tuition for all undergraduates by 2028.
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Dining Out
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Former Hochul aide is charged with being a Chinese agent
She worked in state government for nearly 14 years, including 15 months in 2021 and 2022 as a deputy chief of staff to Gov. Kathy Hochul. She also held various positions in the administration of Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo.
The Justice Department says the official, Linda Sun, 40, used her position to benefit the Chinese government in exchange for payments that went toward a Ferrari and homes on Long Island and in Hawaii.
A 65-page indictment lists 10 criminal counts that include visa fraud, money laundering and other crimes. It accuses Sun of taking substantial economic benefits in return for actions that benefited the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Her husband, Chris Hu, 41, a businessman, was also charged with money laundering. Both pleaded not guilty.
My colleagues William K. Rashbaum and Hurubie Meko write that the accusations against Sun, if true, would represent a brazen manipulation of New York’s state government.
Avi Small, Hochul’s press secretary, said that the administration “terminated her employment in March 2023 after discovering evidence of misconduct.” He added that the administration “immediately reported her actions to law enforcement.”
Prosecutors accused Sun of interceding to block potential meetings between Taiwanese officials and state leaders, including Hochul. “No meeting please,” Sun wrote to an Assembly member who had invited the governor to meet with the ambassador of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. Apparently referring to Hochul, Sun added, “Kindly decline. Do not want her to wade into this China/Taiwan sensitivity.”
Prosecutors also accused Sun of providing unauthorized letters of invitation from the governor’s office to make it easier for Chinese government officials to travel to the U.S. and meet with state officials.
METROPOLITAN diary
Big night out
Dear Diary:
It was 1980, and I was a student at Fordham. Disco was king, and Studio 54 was the place to be. One Saturday night, although my girlfriends and I knew the odds of getting in were long, we decided to take a shot.
So, decked out in our hottest disco wear, we hopped on a D train in the Bronx and headed into Manhattan to take our chances at getting past the velvet rope. We knew that admission was at the whim of the doorman. How could we convince him we were worthy?
With my long hair pinned up, wearing sparkly earrings, a short black coat with a big fur collar and black, strappy, high-heel sandals, I stood slightly away from the fray and feigned indifference.
It took a while, but at some point, my eyes and the doorman’s met. He pointed my way and beckoned me to come inside.
I managed to maintain my poker face.
“I’m here with my two girlfriends,” I said, staring straight in his eyes.
He hesitated, and I started to think I had overplayed my hand.
“OK,” he said. “Them too.”
And in we went.
I don’t remember much about what happened after that, but I was on top of the world for that one night.
— Donna Ledwin
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Luke Caramanico and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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