With only 7 days before the election, Obama, McCain and Co. are ferociously campaigning to win your vote, but — at this late stage of the game — most every state in the Union is decidedly Red or Blue. There are but a handful who still haven’t totally made up their minds.
We’re looking at you Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida.
Political analysts, pundits, and Joe the Plumber are speculating which way these currently-Purple states will swing, but we at The Daily Spritz have decided to remain scientific in our hypothesis. We decided to look to the numbers. We know people use their fragrance as a means of defining themselves. And often times, the way they vote does as well.
So here’s our theory:
Based on the most popular fragrances that were sold at Perfume.com during the last presidential election, we can predict with 99.758%* accuracy how these final five states will swing during this election.
Here’s how this works:
In 2004, our most popular fragrances in states that voted for Republican candidate George W. Bush (we’ll refer to them as “Red State Fragrances”) were:
1. Burberry by Burberry
2. Casual by Paul Sebastian
3. Mackie by Bob Mackie
4. Safari by Ralph Lauren
In states that voted for Democratic candidate John Kerry, our most popular fragrances (we’ll call these “Blue State Fragrances”) were:
1. Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani
2. Jessica McClintock by Jessica McClintock
3. Kenneth Cole Black by Kenneth Cole
4. Tresor by Lancome
We carefully crunched the numbers and tallied up the sales — by state — of these eight fragrances in the past eight weeks and the results are clear and telling. See the graph below for a look at the outcome:
As you can see, Red State Fragrances outsold their Blue State counterparts in Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio, while Blue State Fragrances snatched an unquestionable victory in Nevada.
Amazingly, if not surprisingly, Florida was locked in a dead tie. (We can only hope this doesn’t indicate a repeat of the 2000 election debacle, Florida. Is there such thing as a “hanging chad” in perfume?)
Of course, anything can happen in these last few days before the election. But even when adding up the votes from our super-scientific scent analysis above, the added electorals from our Red State Fragrance buyers can’t push Senator McCain to the front of the pack. Like almost all of the other pollsters, Senator Obama smells like the winner to us.
So why go through all of this trouble predicting the Purple states’ votes?
We love perfume, of course. And speculation.
*This is an actual made up percentage.
