I did not know until recently, when Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) made some confusing and poorly received joke about Democrats calling him racist for drinking Diet Mountain Dew, that people do not know about the culture surrounding the green elixir. (I still don’t really know what he was talking about, but it could have something to do with this or this.)
I won’t claim to be any sort of Dew expert, but I grew up, geographically, somewhere in between where both Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have their roots. I know a few things about the Christian working-man culture wrapped up in what exactly Vance and Walz might be trying to convey with their public displays of affection for the soft drink.
My grandfather was a farmer in a rural part of Illinois who, it seems, passed on his taste for Mountain Dew to my father, who grew up to became an evangelical Christian pastor and a special education teacher. There was a decent stockpile of the beverage in our garage at most points in my childhood. When my dad made the shift from regular to Diet Dew, hoping to lose a few pounds, it was a pivotal childhood memory, torturous to witness my dad make such a significant, difficult switch.
All the dads at our church drank the stuff. I always understood it to be an addictive caffeine fix for those who couldn’t stomach the taste of coffee or wouldn’t be caught dead ordering one of your fancy lattes. Mountain Dew was good enough for my grandpa so it was good enough for my dad. But there’s also a Christian sobriety component to it all. Nazarenes don’t drink so at church potlucks dozens of two-liters were passed around, sticky and spilling, as it was shared in styrofoam cups. When things got really crazy at youth group from time to time, we’d play a few rounds of Dew Pong. In the world, not of it.
Mountain Dew is, as far as I know, not really consumed by people who don’t consider themselves blue-collar or working class. It’s a hit in Appalachia, where it was first made and where Vance claims to have grown up. It’s sometimes associated with sugar highs and rotting teeth. It’s gross to the uninitiated tastebuds (but I won’t pretend I didn’t steal a can or two from my dad’s stash when I was little).
Walz and Vance both make it known that Mountain Dew is their drink of choice over coffee — though Vance more so than Walz as he consistently tries to erase the fact that he went to Yale Law School from the minds of Republican voters. That’s why he keeps being weird about it in public, making a big show of using the Dew to awkwardly toast a Newsmax host and referencing it enough times that he’ll hopefully eventually own the libs.
Walz has done his fair share of goofy social media posts hyping his own love for Doing The Dew. Walz is also sober and hasn’t drank alcohol since he got a DWI in 1995.
It’s no secret that both have been and will continue to play up their working class roots as we speed closer and closer to Election Day, Diet Mountain Dew in hand — but when it comes to articulating your empathy for the blue collar plight, the former social studies public school teacher and union man, with no Ivy League diplomas decorating his walls, may just have the upper hand.
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For whatever it’s worth, Mountain Dew also has lots of aficionados among programmers, for the sugar and caffeine that fuels grinder culture.
It doesn’t go with quiche, but they don’t eat quiche, because vending machines don’t have quiche.
I can tell the exact same story about my step-dad.
Guy lost a lot of weight, too.
Back in the day you’d see these t-shirts on the Heads in the lot.
Of course ‘Morning Dew’ by Bonnie Dobson and made famous by the Grateful Dead is a tragic song about the aftermath of nuclear war.
I love the title of this piece: “The Diet Mountain Dew Race To Be The Least Elite”