Sacramento Favorites: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three "Sacramento" ballots, one city, and they don't share a single vote

Two owners, two domains, one metro area. Sacramento Favorites runs at sacramentofavorites.com under the Sacramento Bee. Across town, SN&R runs Best of Sacramento at bestofsac.com, a separate program with its own category list. Neither shares a ballot, a results page, or a voting window with the other. Get the domain wrong and a campaign's votes go nowhere near the intended category. There's a third layer, too. The Sacramento Bee also runs a weekly Athlete of the Week poll through the SI high school sports network, prep sports on a weekly cadence, nothing to do with business voting at all. Three different things, one shared word: Sacramento.

Sacramento's competing "best of" programs

Program	Domain	Owner	Cadence
Sacramento Favorites	sacramentofavorites.com	Sacramento Bee (McClatchy)	Annual
Best of Sacramento	bestofsac.com	SN&R	Annual
Athlete of the Week	si.com high school network	Sacramento Bee (McClatchy)	Weekly, in-season

This page covers Sacramento Favorites specifically. For the athlete poll, see our Sacramento Bee Athlete of the Week page instead, and check the California contest hub for how both compare against the state's other confirmed readers-choice programs.

275,000 votes and a 117% jump nobody running the campaign should ignore

The number that matters most sits in the growth rate, not the raw total. Sacramento Favorites' 2025 edition, its third year, drew more than 275,000 votes. That's up 117% from the year before. Turnout roughly doubled while the ballot itself was only in its third cycle, still young compared with decades-old readers-choice programs in bigger markets. More than 4,700 businesses landed nominations across the 282 categories on offer. Do that arithmetic and it's clear no single business dominates the total vote count; 275,000 votes spread across that many nominees and categories means most individual races stay winnable without needing a runaway lead.

Sacramento Favorites 2025 quick facts

Item	Detail
Publisher	Sacramento Bee (McClatchy)
Official site	sacramentofavorites.com
Category count	282
Program year	2025, third edition
2025 total votes	275,000+
2025 nominated businesses	4,700+
Vote growth vs. prior year	117%

A program growing this fast in only its third year behaves differently from a mature ballot where category rankings barely shift. New nominees are still finding it; the field isn't locked in yet.

282 categories means picking the right one matters more than campaign effort

A bakery entered under a broad "restaurants" label competes against steakhouses and taco trucks with entirely different customer bases. Get the category wrong at the nomination stage and there's no fixing it later, no matter how many loyal regulars show up wanting to help.

Match the label to how customers already describe the business

With 282 categories on the 2025 ballot, Sacramento Favorites splits far finer than a generic "best restaurant, best shop" list. That granularity helps a niche business, a specific cuisine, a specific service type, if the nomination lands in the category customers would actually search for, not the closest broad match. Businesses running a parallel local campaign can compare notes with the restaurant vote campaign guide for customer-outreach timing, and the general buy votes online overview covers how nominate-then-vote structures like this one tend to run start to finish.

What a business controls between nomination and results, and what it doesn't

Nothing moves automatically once a nomination goes in. The Sacramento Bee tallies submissions on its own internal schedule, and there's a real gap where no public vote exists yet, nothing to click, nothing to check. Then the finalist round opens and the actual voting window begins. A message that skips the category name or the exact business name makes a Sacramento reader do work they won't bother with between errands. Program name. Category. Business name. Link to sacramentofavorites.com. Four facts, one message, repeated as the window narrows toward close. See award-style vote campaigns for mechanics that apply broadly to a readers-choice format like this one. A founder-facing business, where the owner's own visibility drives repeat trade, might also look at the personal-brand vote outreach guide for framing reminders that name a specific principal alongside the ballot link itself.

Elk Grove, Roseville, Folsom, and how geography actually plays into this ballot

Sacramento Favorites groups nominees by category, and the live ballot's own scope decides whether a Roseville nominee and a Sacramento nominee land in the same race in a given year, this guide can't override that. What's confirmed is the metro footprint: Sacramento, Elk Grove, Roseville, Folsom, Davis, Rocklin, Citrus Heights, and Rancho Cordova all fall inside the program's coverage area based on the 4,700-plus nominated businesses drawn in 2025. A suburb like Folsom or Rocklin often carries a tighter, more centralized customer base than the city core, which can matter more in a still-young, fast-growing program than in an older ballot where turnout patterns have already settled. Businesses weighing whether to enter a statewide program instead can look at Best of Central California, a similarly structured McClatchy nominate-then-vote ballot one Central Valley market over, and Best of Nevada for a same-owner comparison across state lines.

What sacramentofavorites.com doesn't publish, and why that matters for claims

No independent archive of Sacramento Favorites' first two editions exists outside the organizer's own site, at least none we could confirm. The 275,000-vote, 4,700-business, 117%-growth figures cited here are the confirmed 2025 numbers specifically; an earlier or later year will carry different totals entirely. Checking a competitor's claim? Record the year and category before repeating anything as fact. Promoting a real result? "Sacramento Favorites 2025 winner, [category]" survives scrutiny because it matches the confirmed turnout data for that specific edition. Before results post, "nominated" and "finalist" are the only honest words to use. See how genuine vote drives are run for the standard behind any legitimate campaign push here.