Long Island has its own presidential poll this election year — the humorous and completely unscientific survey of The Monogram Shop/Cieslak’s Modern Bakery.

When legitimate polls show a presidential race so close that it falls within the statistical margin of error, informal polls might be just as good a predictor. And two Suffolk County stores selling Kamala Harris and Donald Trump branded merchandise show a divided local electorate.

At the Monogram Shop in East Hampton, which sells housewares, owner Valerie Smith, every presidential election year since 2004, has sold plastic cups printed with the candidates’ names – accurately predicting the winner each time, except in 2016. In Lindenhurst, the 90-year-old Cieslak’s Modern Bakery this year began selling cookies emblazoned with the name of Democratic candidate Harris or Republican candidate Trump.

“We thought it would be fun to watch what’s going on,” said Eileen Biggs, 72, of Lindenhurst, who with her sister Lauren Zacher runs the family bakery founded by their late grandfather in 1934. – the white cookies, colored red for Trump and blue for Harris with the candidate’s name in white icing and the year 2024, began selling in October for $2.49 each. “We don’t get them every day, usually only on weekends, but if people ask us, we’ll make them up.”

Biggs said she stopped tracking which candidate was “winning” sales shortly after the cookies launched, but that “Trump was ahead at that point.”

The Monogram store offers stackable, unbreakable 16-ounce plastic cups year-round for $3 each, but adds candidate names — and publishes a sales tally — during presidential election cycles. The store’s website describes its cup count as a way to “measure the temperature of the election.”

“We started in the primaries (in 2004) when there were multiple candidates, and we had cuts for each, just to see where the enthusiasm was going into this election,” Smith, 75, said. of East Hampton, who runs the 27-year-old boutique with her granddaughter, Sophie Mengus. “Once we had the two candidates, (George W.) Bush and (John) Kerry, we kept going. And we’ve done it every year since.”

This year, Trump was ahead of Joe Biden by 2,610 to 847 as of July 21. The store introduced Harris Cuts on July 24, after the vice president became the presumptive Democratic nominee. The most recent count, as of October 30, shows Harris 14,1244, Trump 4,942.

Such informal surveys about whether retailers buy a product are not uncommon, said Erica Chase-Gregory, director of the Small Business Development Center at Farmingdale State College. While they may or may not have an effect on sales, novelty can help keep a store in people’s minds, she said.

“I don’t think it’s going to move things too much one way or the other,” she said of the sales potential of such efforts. “Maybe someone will buy an extra cookie if they buy a cake. Or maybe someone comes in and loves the cups and says, ‘Oh, I’d like 20 for a picnic.’ »

“It doesn’t translate into a commercial windfall,” Smith acknowledged. “A lot of people only buy one cup.” But the effort had “a huge effect,” she said, in expanding her store’s reach. “People who would never dream of coming into the store – read: men – come just to buy the cups.”

She added: “I didn’t start doing this as a marketing ploy. I started selling mugs in 2004 simply because I was curious about who people were supporting, rather than concocting this as a smart way to generate foot traffic.”

The bottom line, Chase-Gregory said, is that a store remains neutral. “If you’re bipartisan, no one leaves and says, ‘I was put off.’ No one feels attacked and it shows that the company is just having fun. »

In the case of cookies and cups, Harris leading in one Suffolk locality and Trump in another seems to mirror the county itself: the 2020 election saw a razor-thin difference of 232 votes between the two major party candidates , according to the county board. elections, with 381,253 for Trump (49.40%) and 381,021 (49.37%) for Biden.

Yet in this very heated 2024 election, Smith said, his store has faced vitriol online, even though its polling has been impartial. Until 2020, it published daily counts online without incident. This year, “we got all kinds of really nasty comments online that never make it into the store. … We just thought it was nasty and so we removed (the daily counts) from the site.”

At the bakery, some of those unpleasantness happened face to face, Biggs said. “Some people are incentivized if their (candidate’s) cookie isn’t there,” she said. “We always have to keep at least one of each (displayed) on the shelf” on days when cookies are available. “Otherwise, they get insulted. It’s incredible.”

Smith — who has her mugs printed at a factory in Texas — doesn’t know when she’ll stop selling this year’s items. After the November 5 elections, she will be able to put the leftovers “in a box on the street and it will say “free”. “

Or maybe not. “I won’t be surprised,” she said, “if people want to come afterward and continue to buy them as souvenirs. It’s been a pretty historic election year, let’s be real.”