Best Thanksgiving Side Dish Tournament Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Thanksgiving table argument, run as a listener poll

When Thanksgiving approaches, 92.9 The Ticket hands its Maine audience a debate with nothing to do with sports scores. The Best Thanksgiving Side Dish Tournament Poll poses the question in the station's own framing: side dishes are pretty universally understood to be the best things on the table, so which is the best of the best? Listeners settle it by public vote, advancing their favorite dish through the bracket.

Structurally this is a best-of vertical ballot in the food and seasonal lane, and the station keeps it in-house: the poll lives at 929theticket.com under its own address, with no third-party contest service in the middle. That placement puts the voting experience beside the station's shows, its athlete of the week feature and its other listener promotions, all under one masthead.

For anyone backing a particular dish, the setting shapes strategy. This is not a business award with commercial stakes, and it is not a fundraiser. It is seasonal audience engagement, which means the people who see the ballot are the station's listeners and whoever its coverage pulls in. Reach inside that audience matters more than reach anywhere else, and every realistic plan for this bracket starts there.

What the November history confirms, and what it leaves out

The documented run for this program is unusually tidy. Editions appear for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, six straight years, each tied to November. The 2021 edition left the clearest trace: the station's article introducing that year's tournament was published on November 17, 2021, placing the ballot in the run-up to Thanksgiving. The streak points toward a 2027 return.

What the history does not settle is the day-level schedule. The station names the month but prints neither the opening day nor the closing day of the window, so those details should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The bracket's round calendar is in the same position: the dates that move the tournament from one pairing to the next are not published anywhere the documented pages reach, so a supporter who wants to catch every round has to follow the page itself through the month.

Rules are the other open question. No per-person limit, no eligibility terms and no statement about repeat voting appear alongside the poll. A supporter planning a serious push is therefore working from the ballot's observable behavior rather than a written rulebook. For a seasonal listener poll that is common, but it is a gap worth knowing about before the November window arrives.

Casting a vote on the live ballot

Voting here asks little of anyone. A supporter loads the tournament poll page on 929theticket.com while the November window is open, reads the side dish matchup in front of them, chooses the dish worth advancing and submits. Because the format is a bracket, the pairings on screen shift as rounds progress, so what a visitor sees on a given day reflects whichever stage the station is running at that moment.

That round-by-round structure is the one part of the mechanic that demands attention. A dish can win its matchup and still need fresh votes in the next one, and the station does not publish the round schedule ahead of time. Returning to the page repeatedly through the window, rather than voting once and drifting away, is the behavior this format rewards. The station's own framing, which asks readers to weigh in on the best of the best, treats the poll as an ongoing conversation across the season rather than a single click.

Practical habits follow. Load the ballot address directly instead of hunting through site navigation, since the poll surfaces prominently only while it is live. Vote early in each round rather than at the wire, because a stage can close whenever the station decides. And if the page presents a sign-in or confirmation step, follow it, since the live ballot is the only authority on what a valid vote requires in any given year.

Where this ballot sits among Maine's best-of programs

Maine readers have no shortage of voted programs to choose from, and this poll holds a narrow slice of that field. The same station also fronts Best of the 207, a broader best-of franchise, while other publishers run their own statewide ballots: Best of Maine from Down East, the Kennebec Journal Readers' Choice program, the Mainebiz Readers' Choice awards for the business community, the Maine Restaurant Week Diners' Choice ballot for the dining scene, and the Maine Parade of Homes People's Choice for builders.

What separates the Thanksgiving side dish tournament from all of them is scope and stakes. Each of those programs spans a wide category field, often crowning businesses whose results carry commercial weight. This poll is a single-topic seasonal debate with no commercial category list at all: one bracket, one holiday, one question. A vote here expresses taste, not a business endorsement.

That narrowness cuts both ways for a supporter. There is no category strategy to manage and no slate of nominees to coordinate, so effort concentrates on a single dish through a single November window. But the audience is bounded by the station's reach, and the bracket format means momentum has to be rebuilt each round. Anyone running a Maine best-of campaign across several programs should treat this ballot as its own short, sharp effort rather than folding it into a wider plan.

Strengthening support for a side dish on this ballot

Because the voters here are the station's listeners, the strongest support comes from inside that audience. Share the ballot link where 92.9 The Ticket's followers already gather, time the ask to the November window when the poll is actually live, and remind people that a bracket needs fresh votes each round. A dish with a story, whether a family recipe or a Maine classic, gives people a reason to pick it and pass it along.

The organizer has published nothing about outside vote help for this ballot, so its position on purchased participation is unknown. What the format does make clear is the setting: a seasonal, single-topic bracket on a station's own site, where visible enthusiasm from real listeners is the currency the poll was built to measure. Our award votes page explains how support options work across ballots of this kind, and what to weigh before using them.