Whether you’re a Nate Silver devotee who’s wholeheartedly with Her or you just poll your buddies while on vigilante border patrol, in the homestretch of this surreal election it’s hard not to compulsively check the latest projections of who will win. So you might be interested to learn that on Newtown Lane, in East Hampton, Long Island, there’s a Presidential predictor with a perfect track record.

Every election year since 2004, the Monogram Shop—a narrow, packed purveyor of personalized baby sweaters ($75) and beach-towel baskets ($195)—has kept a careful tally of its sales of three-dollar reusable plastic cups emblazoned with the candidates’ names and logos. (Similar cups that say “Roadie” and “Forced Family Fun” are not counted.) For the past three elections, whichever candidate’s cup has sold best has become President. As of Friday, the sign in the shop’s front window noted that 4,056 Clinton cups and 2,976 Trump cups had been sold.

Last week, Valerie Smith, the shop’s proprietor, explained that, when she started posting the cup count during the George W. Bush–John Kerry contest, “the Bush people would see that the Kerry numbers were larger and come in and say, ‘Gimme a hundred cups.’ ” She added, “I mean, they were master-of-the-universe-type guys.”

Smith tidied some merchandise—napkins that said “Have You Seen My Contractor????” ($18) and platters (“Life Is Short . . . Buy the Shoes”)—and recalled, “All summer long, Kerry was ahead, and right about now Bush’s cup sales started to surge.” After the Obama cups beat the McCain cups and then the Romney cups, Smith said, “I started saying stuff like ‘The cups know.’ ”

In previous years, Smith has stocked cups for primary contenders (the manufacturer misspelled Giuliani), but not this election cycle; she would’ve had to become the Cup Shop. “About a year ago, I just threw spaghetti at the wall and ordered ‘Rubio,’ ‘Hillary,’ and ‘Jeb Bush,’ complete with the exclamation point,” she said. “The Rubio cups sold out and the Hillary cups sold out, and I had a bathroom full of Jeb cups.” When Bush dropped out of the race, she tried to give his cups away. Eventually, she said, “someone who was on his way to Maine to see the Bush family took a whole bunch of them.”

She settled behind the counter, a golden retriever named Dixie at her feet, and continued, “I finally got the Trump cups in April, and they sold so briskly I cannot tell you. He was ahead by a lot.” On July 17th, Clinton caught up, to 1,174 each, and then began to pull ahead.

A blond woman with an Australian accent breezed in and commenced oohing and aahing over knickknacks.

Can Smith identify shoppers’ politics on sight?

“I have not gotten it right once,” she whispered. “I mean, a woman comes in with the NPR bag and the gray ponytail, and I think, O.K. We’ve got a Clinton voter here, right? Six Trump cups.”

This year, Smith also peddled piñatas of the candidates. “When Hillary came to town in August, I took hers out of the window,” Smith said. The host of a Clinton fund-raiser had bought five hundred Hillary cups, which Smith decided not to include in the official tally: “I wouldn’t screw around with it!”

The Australian paid for cards embossed with “——regrets his behavior at——” and a large, nickel-plated matchbox with a Veuve Clicquot-label top. Her political proclivities remained unknown.

How does Smith explain the cups’ prophetic powers? “Even though there’s a perception of this town being élitist and all that, somehow I think the population here representatively falls about the same as the nation,” she suggested. “Not everyone is a one-per-center; there are just perfectly regular citizens marching up the streets and the beaches of East Hampton.” Smith said that she had stocked “Feel the Bern” matchboxes—“They were pretty popular”—but was leery about ordering Bernie cups, as they were available only by the hundred. Cocktail napkins that resembled ballots with three boxes—Clinton, Trump, Neither of the above—had sold briskly and, she said, “ ‘No Trump’ napkins have also sold extremely well. I kind of cover myself by saying that they’re for bridge players.” ♦