Methodology: The 2026 Cheesecake Index

Sources

• Locations: The Cheesecake Factory's locations page, geocoded to county and congressional district.
• Election results: civicAPI, county-level results for U.S. House, U.S. Senate and Governor (2,466 rows, 351 races).
• Both datasets were human-pulled and validated before anything went in the oven.

Results as of Nov. 5, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET. Unofficial and still being counted.

By the Numbers

The restaurants

Race coverage, by location

The races

Coverage counts include all 220 locations (coming-soon too) and only House, Senate and Governor races. A location "has" a race when civicAPI reports that race in the location's county. District codes use the 2026 (120th Congress) lines; see Kitchen Notes.

Data Kitchen Notes

Where the recipe needed adjusting, and what we did about it.

• The big re-pull. The first civicAPI export missed whole districts (California 25th, Florida 12th, Florida 26th, Tennessee 4th, Tennessee 9th, most of Los Angeles County, all of Connecticut). We rebuilt the pull from civicAPI's national House, Senate and Governor rollups, keeping every race in a state with a Cheesecake Factory. Result: 1,988 → 2,466 rows, 228 → 351 races (123 added, 0 dropped), House races 173 → 295. Overlapping rows matched except for live vote updates and fixed name accents.
• Connecticut planning regions. Connecticut swapped counties for nine planning regions, and civicAPI reports towns and regions with no FIPS codes. The region rows add up exactly to their towns, so we mapped them by name: Capitol (09110), Greater Bridgeport (09120), Western Connecticut (09190). That's 38 rows covering Governor and Connecticut 1st through 5th. Connecticut has no Senate race this year.
• Virginia Beach. An independent city, reported by civicAPI as "Virginia Beach City" with no FIPS. Mapped by name to 51810. Races found: Virginia 2nd; Virginia Senate.
• Washington, D.C. Only the DC Mayor race is in the data, at 0% reporting with zero votes. DC wards are mapped to 11001. DC's non-voting House delegate race is listed by civicAPI (also 0%) but isn't a House seat in the Index. The Mayor race is shown on the map and left out of every total.
• Puerto Rico. civicAPI has no Puerto Rico races, so San Juan sits off the map with an empty plate.
• Region types accepted: County (2,377), Planning Region (38), Ward (32), Parish (11), City (8). A "Chicago" region civicAPI attaches to some Illinois House races has no FIPS and zero votes, and is skipped.
• Name cleanup. Accented names (Sánchez, Luján, Peña…) arrive intact, and double spaces in names are collapsed.
• The location file. Two coming-soon rows (Concord Mills, NC and Valley Stream, NY) were split across two lines in the export; the "all-NULL" looking lines were their second halves, and both were stitched back together. Nothing was dropped.

How the Index Works

1. Slice by county. Every civicAPI result row is one candidate's votes in one county (or parish, ward, Connecticut planning region or independent city) for one race.
2. Keep the Cheesecake counties. We keep slices in counties with at least one Cheesecake Factory, coming-soon locations included (143 counties, 141 of them with Index votes: DC has only its Mayor race and PR has no races). We believe in them.
3. Count each county once. Los Angeles County has 12 locations, but its voters are counted once in the headline Index. The House Index is every House vote cast in a Cheesecake county, across all districts touching it.
4. Group the parties. Democratic, Republican, Independent, and Other for everyone else.
5. Margin = Democratic share − Republican share of all votes in the slice (positive = D). Third-party votes count in the denominator.
6. Per-slice weighting (secondary view): each county is weighted by how many locations it has, so Los Angeles counts 12 times. Think of it as "per restaurant" rather than "per county."
7. DC's Mayor race is excluded from every total; it isn't a federal or gubernatorial race and has no votes yet.

The Index, as computed for this page

Why more races than counties (or restaurants): a county can sit in several House districts, so 141 Cheesecake counties touch 295 House races. Los Angeles County, CA alone touches 18 House districts. Each race counts only the votes cast inside Cheesecake counties. Overall counts each race once.

The Overall row adds up the House, Senate and Governor votes, so a voter who voted in all three races counts three times.

Colors

• D Democratic
• R Republican
• I Independent
• O Other (Libertarian, Green, write-in, nonpartisan…)

Map fills shade from light to dark by margin in the leader's color. Gray is an Independent-led slice, pale gray means no race, and muted means no Cheesecake.

Superlatives

The dessert-cart awards (Bluest Slice, Reddest Slice, Too Close to Cheesecake, Biggest Appetite, Ordering Off the Menu, Most Cheesecakes per County, Half-and-Half Ticket Splitter, Still in the Oven, Independent Streak) are computed from each location's House slice (coming-soon included), and from Senate/Governor for ticket-splitting. Bluest/reddest/closest only consider slices with both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. Minimum-flavor rule: a slice needs at least 10,000 votes counted to win an award or top a ranking, so a barely-reporting county sliver can't take Bluest Slice.

Caveats

• A county is not a restaurant's clientele. We measure how the county voted, not who ordered the avocado eggrolls.
• Unofficial, as-of results. Counts were still moving when we pulled them. Uncalled and partially reported races are listed above.
• Correlation ≠ Cheesecake causation. Cheesecake Factories go where people, malls and money are, which also tend to be big, Democratic-leaning suburbs and cities. Nobody's vote is being decided by a slice of Ultimate Red Velvet. Probably.