For the last few weeks 7-Eleven has been giving coffee-drinking customers a taste of the November general election by offering them a choice between two coffee cups: blue for Obama or red for McCain. Caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee drinkers alike have been weighing in on the presidential election via the coffee cup they choose.

And the winner by a landslide (so far) is . . .

Obama. Some 60% of the franchise chain's coffee drinkers nationwide have chosen the blue Barack Obama cup versus 40% who preferred the red John McCain. In every state that has 7-Eleven convenience stores, the donkey outpaced the elephant, except for New Hampshire, the live free or die state. Two states, North Carolina and West Virginia, had Obama and McCain evenly matched at 50 percent each.

States with the most techies lean blue

Computerworld's tech-writer Patrick Thibodeau had fun analyzing sales of candidate coffee cups at 7-Eleven stores in states with higher numbers of high-tech workers.  He finds that caffeine consuming geeks overwhelmingly prefer riding a donkey to an elephant. Michigan, with 176,100 tech workers, prefers Obama cups 62% to 38%. At 941,000, California has the mostest in tech employees. It comes out in favor of Obama at 64%.

A well-known IT writer, Robert Cringely, wonders in his blog today how accurate such predictions can be. He asks, "They drink their coffee at 7-Eleven, so what do they know?"

But according to 7-Eleven's site, its convenience-store coffee consumers actually know quite a bit when it comes to peering into the future. 

The 7-Election site struts its credentials by observing, "In the 2000 7-Election, our George W. Bush coffee cup outsold Al Gore's cup by just 1 percentage point." And if that weren't proof enough, it goes on, "The 2004 7-Election results tracked identically with published national election results: 51% for George W. Bush and 49% for John Kerry."

There Are Anomolies Though

A few states are eyebrow raisers. Utahns are 59% blue? Rumor has it that Nixon is still popular there. And Ohioans vote more for Obama than any other state at 66%? Last we heard, that state was almost in a statistical dead heat.

Cringely wants us to know that he does not run with the techie pack or drink from the same cup as 7-Eleven customers. To let us know how impartial he is in writing on such political matters, he declares, "This year I'm not endorsing either nominee. Instead, I'm urging readers to vote for me as a write-in candidate. I'm younger than John McCain, wear less makeup than Sarah Palin, have more hair than Joe Biden, and I never pal around with terrorists unless they're buying."

"Hey, we've done worse," he concludes.

One thing recent history has shown. If Cringely wants to be President, he'll first have to get his own 7-Eleven coffee cup.