As Americans across the country get ready for Tuesday night’s debate in Pennsylvania, a family-owned bakery in the town of Hatboro is once again using cookies to gauge support for the presidential candidates.
These cookies have been a hot seller for the bakery, with 4228 sold expressing support for former President Trump, whereas only 369 have been sold expressing support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
CBS News Philadelphia’s Ross DiMattei spoke to the owner of Lochel’s Bakery, Kathleen Lochel, about how she has been selling cookies themed around presidential elections for years.
"Every sale gets marked off. Currently, right now, as you can see, Trump is in the lead significantly. And compared to the 2020 numbers, right now, year to date in 2020, the margin is astonishing," Lochel said.
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"The margin is even greater this year than it was 4 years ago?" DiMattei asked as he marveled at how far the Trump cookies are outpacing Harris in the Philadelphia suburb. He later suggested, "Maybe that has to do with where you guys are situated and all, but you’ve also seen strong support for the former president."
"All over the country," Lochel said. "And Montgomery County is a blue county per se, so I wanna get that out there, but at least a third of those cookies have been shipped all over the United States."
DiMattei then said "Really quickly I wanna address the keyboard warriors out there. You’ve been getting some hate, but again, this is not politically driven, right? This is all about business."
"No, it’s business, and who wouldn’t want to sell these? Like, it’s creativity and that’s what you need. In business you have to be creative and think out of the box and get new people to come into your store, and in our case, shipping all over the United States right now," she said.
"That’s tremendous. Tremendous for us as a small business to produce this and sell this as well, and see the faces that are coming around to buy these from all over," she said.
The bakery has emphasized this is a lighthearted project multiple times, writing in a recent social media post about this "cookie tally" to "Keep calm.. its a cookie."
Fox29 reported, "The bakery has hosted this informal poll since 2012, predicting the outcome of three of the last four elections. Their winning streak came to an end in 2020 when the final cookie tally put Trump in the lead with 31,804 cookies over Biden's 5,750."
