Do you prefer your wine red or blue?
Mrs. Vino and I recently dined with some friends at Chicago’s fashionable restaurant, Green Zebra, when I admitted to booking a ticket on Southwest Airlines. Our dining companions looked aghast. Had I committed a social faux pas among the trendy diners by confessing budget-mindedness? “Don’t fly Southwest,” one dining companion blurted out. “They give to Republicans.”
With Americans still feeling the election’s split into red states and blue states, many consumers follow the money that flows from places they shop into politics. Wine enthusiasts, a bunch with inquiring minds, might also want to know similar information. Thanks to the Center for Responsive Politics, such an undertaking is now an easy proposition.
The table below shows the political contributions of the big liquor interests. The original data were sorted by amount but I sorted by strength of party contribution to help those consumers who view their wines as red or blue identify the political color of their wine more quickly.
The wine, beer, and liquor industry still remains a relatively small player in terms of political contributions: many industries such as lawyers, real estate, and oil, greatly outstripped the whole drinks industry in the 2004 election cycle (about $11 million). The political color of the donations, now 63% “red,” has tilted toward Republicans over the past fifteen years, although there is also a tendency toward favoring incumbents.
Traditionally, this category has been a small political donor because the range of issues has been narrowly focused on alcohol taxes and regulations. However, the National Beer Distributors has recently increased their donations and shifted the focus toward making the repeal of the estate tax permanent. Their members include family-owned distributorships.
While this data captures information from some wine makers as well as some distributors of beer and wine, the Center for Responsive Politics does not provide easy information on retailers. The retail end of wine sales had been consolidating too: Costco and Sam’s Club account for about a third of all wine sold in the US. Although polarized, there is some equality among the two big retailers since Costco executives give heavily to Democrats while Wal-Mart (which owns Sam’s Club) executives give mostly to Republicans.
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
