On Wednesday, November 14, analysts at the National Institute for Research on the Subject of Beverage Preferences (NIRSBP) released the results of their poll on, expectedly, beverage preferences. For some reason, the NIRSBP had previously decided to withhold the exact details of the study and its purposes, citing national security as the primary motivator for secrecy, but has deemed the information safe for public consumption as of this past week.
The study, titled A Comprehensive Survey of Juice Drinking Preferences, came out showing that Americans favor apple juice above all others, citing a 41% vote in its favor. The next most popular juice, orange, came in at 39%, and the third-party candidate, cranberry, finished with a solid 12%. The remaining 12% was divided between lesser-known contenders such as grapefruit and grape – though analysts say that some may have been confused by the similarities in these two’s names.
This marks the first time that an incumbent champion (formerly orange juice) has been beaten by a margin of less than 3%, making for a closer race than has ever been seen before. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, speaking on the subject, said that “Usually the American public is much more volatile than this. They tend to turn sharply against whomever they view as the source of the problems facing our society, which more often than not tends to be the ones in power. So we’ve seen juice studies in the past that favor the challenger much more heavily, so this one really bucks the trend. Even I didn’t see this one coming…I might lose my job over it.”
Mr. Silver has in his contract with the New York Times a clause forbidding him to be wrong about any major polling discovery or to predict percentages more than .42 points off from the actual.
Officials at the NIRSBP (most notably its current president, James Gold) have defended the results heavily, citing rigid guidelines of polling and how to take sample sets. “We run a clean shop here at the NIRSBP,” he wrote in his letter to our editors, only stumbling a little over the correct sequence of letters in the acronym, “and we won’t stand for this kind of thing. Honestly, it’s just juice; I don’t see why it matters this much.”
Gold went on to tell The Banner about the systematic approach to collecting ballots, ensuring that no falsification had occurred. “We had poll watchers come out to prevent fraud, and no one working the booths was allowed any campaign propaganda in the voting site. Really, though, my job is a joke, this isn’t important. Must we always be debating something?”
A spokesman for orange juice announced later Wednesday that the former champion would be retiring peacefully to Florida as soon as his term ends. Apple juice accepted the title graciously, seeing as it is an inanimate object, and plans to continue to “live life as normal” on the shelves of grocery stores across America.