The 2024 presidential race has taken an unexpected turn, with Diet Mountain Dew unexpectedly becoming a focal point of political discussion. It all began with a joke by Donald Trump's VP pick, JD Vance, and has since ignited a debate that touches on identity, authenticity, and cultural divides.
The Spark: Vance's "Racist" Dew
During a rally in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, Vance quipped that Democrats would accuse him of racism for anything, including drinking Diet Mountain Dew. "I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too," Vance told the crowd. This seemingly innocuous statement opened a Pandora's Box of commentary and controversy.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, responded to Vance's comment with skepticism. In an interview with CNN, Beshear questioned Vance's connection to Kentucky and his "everyman" persona. "What was weird was him joking about racism today, and then talking about Diet Mountain Dew," Beshear said. "Who drinks Diet Mountain Dew? But in all seriousness, he ain't from here. He is not from Kentucky. …This is a guy who went out to Silicon Valley that's trying to be an every man, (but) he ain't one of us." Beshear later made a Mountain Dew joke of his own during a Thursday press conference, where he endorsed Ale 8 One as the "soft drink of Kentucky".
Walz's Dew Devotion
As it turns out, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, is also a Diet Mountain Dew enthusiast. Walz doesn’t drink alcohol or coffee, instead opting for Diet Dew as his beverage of choice. He has often tweeted about it, sharing, “Nothing better than getting my day started with some #OneMinnesota Diet Mountain Dew,” back in 2019.
While recording an episode of Pod Save America last month, not one, but two bottles of the stuff sat on Walz’s desk, ready for the sipping. A Los Angeles Times profile of Walz highlighted a social media interaction between him and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, in which she joked that Walz was “Dew’n it again” as he headed to the fridge for his soda. Walz, in true Big Dad Energy form, replied, “Had to Dew it.” In April of this year, he tweeted with genuine delight about an office surprise for his 60th birthday, specifically calling out that the celebration was “complete with Diet Mountain Dew, of course.”
Read also: Explore the political divide surrounding Diet Mountain Dew
A Cultural Icon
Diet Mountain Dew isn’t red or blue. It’s been eye-searingly neon, brat green before brat had even considered bratting, and it’s found a foothold as a cultural symbol. The original Mountain Dew was reportedly invented in the late 1930s by two brothers who, upon moving from Georgia to Tennessee, couldn’t find a local source for their favorite whiskey mixer. They mixed up their own lemon-lime carbonated concoction and called it Mountain Dew, slang for moonshine, packaged it in green bottles, and sold it as a delightful Appalachian treat. PepsiCo purchased the drink in 1964, and by 1974 had tinted it to be the neon green caffeine powerhouse we know today.
It’s a sort of lowbrow favorite, the Crocs of beverages, and can serve as a middle finger to the matcha-sipping crowd. According to recent data, Mountain Dew (non-diet) is the fifth-most popular soda in the US, while the diet variety has something like a 2% market share nationwide. The Dew family of sodas has been embraced by gamers and the extreme sports crowd, as well as the everyman of the noncoastal states. Lana Del Rey released a song called “Diet Mountain Dew” on Born to Die, comparing a love interest to the drink and declaring, “you’re no good for me.” It’s a social signifier with a screw-top: Vance and Walz drink Diet Mountain Dew, and the coastal elite drink Diet Coke.
Duane Stanford, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, says that while the drink is available across the country, Mountain Dew is particularly popular with people in both the candidates' regions, really, its strongest in the South and the Midwest. Sort of the heartland states is where Mountain Dew has a lot of its loyal following.
Vance vs. Walz: Dew-ing it Differently
Though the two vice presidential candidates both enjoy the same beverage, there’s a difference in how they do it, and how it’s perceived. When Vance does the Dew, he explicitly calls it out. When he said that Democrats would find a way to call his drink racist, he was hoping potential voters would hear a message that he’s one of them, just cracking open a Diet Dew and going about his business, unfairly maligned by liberals who just don’t get it. On August 1, during an interview with Newsmax, Vance doubled down on the Dew, opening a fresh bottle and asking host Bianca de la Garza if they should toast. “This is the good stuff here. High caffeine, low calorie,” he said before taking a swig.
Vance inspires cringe with his blatant determination to brand himself as a Mountain Dew Guy, Son of Appalachia, even as it’s repeatedly pointed out that the Hillbilly Elegy author grew up in suburban Ohio, which is not part of Appalachia.
Read also: A Healthier Joyce Vance: Her Weight Loss Story
On the other hand, Walz has made it clear that Diet Mountain Dew is just his normal thing. He’s been tweeting about the stuff for years, sharing, “Nothing better than getting my day started with some #OneMinnesota Diet Mountain Dew,” back in 2019. When you really love something, it shows, even if you don’t namedrop it at your rallies. Democrats have hailed Walz “taking back” the drink and delighted in spotting Walz partaking in the wild, sharing compilations of his past Dew drops and gleefully memeing his love of the soda. They marvel at his seemingly bottomless capacity for the stuff, noting with awe that while he drinks three-ish bottles a day now, he used to drink twice that much.
As for Beshear’s comments about drinking Diet Mountain Dew being weird, he elaborated in a news conference the next day, apologizing to fans of the beverage, as well as to the soda itself-but not Vance. “So if you enjoy Diet Mountain Dew, you be you, we want to support you,” he said.
Vance's "Everyman" Image Under Scrutiny
Underpinning both Vance’s rally joke, and the broader response to it, are questions about whether Vance is actually as much of an everyman as he says he is, specifically when it comes to what he says are his Appalachian roots. “It’s natural to think that someone who wrote a memoir entitled ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is from Appalachia,” the memo read. “But there is an official government definition of Appalachia, and it’s quite expansive running all the way from counties in Mississippi to counties in New York State. However, some of the hesitation from those in the region about Vance is rooted in something deeper - a sense that he doesn’t actually understand them. To them, Vance's portrayal of Appalachian in both his book and on rally stages feels like an outsider's perspective, oversimplifying the complexities and resilience of their communities. They argue that his lens of individual responsibility overlooks systemic issues and the strong sense of solidarity that binds them together. Gov. Beshear put it plainly in the same press conference where he apologized for dunking on Mountain Dew.
Questionable Statements
A video version of the podcast was published to YouTube on 20 September 2021, and events discussed in it suggest that it was recorded in the days immediately before. The liberal watchdog Media Matters had previously flagged the broadcast.
At that time, Vance was a relatively new political candidate. He achieved national prominence as a writer in 2016, but on 1 July 2021 he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. That March, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated $10m to Protect Ohio Values, a Pac established to support a potential Vance candidacy.
Read also: J.D. Vance's weight loss: A story of dedication.
Introducing the discussion, Solheim speculated that Vance “may end up with some angry texts after this one. It was a very spicy episode.” In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers. At about 39 minutes into the recording, when asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.” Vance added: “What they don’t realize - and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God - is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do. The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”
Minutes later, Vance adopted the perspective of a hypothetical professional woman to answer Sharma’s question about where “the racial and gender resentment comes from”. “OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,” Vance began, “And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.” He continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”
On the other hand, Vance depicted men and boys as “suppressed”, saying 52 minutes in that “one of the weird things about elite society is it’s deeply uncomfortable with masculinity”. Warming to the theme, Vance said: “This is one weird thing that conservatives don’t talk about enough … We don’t talk enough about the fact that traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood.” Assessing his young son’s habit of fighting imaginary monsters, Vance said: “There’s something deeply cultural and biological, spiritual about this desire to defend his home and his family.”
These events led the trio to discussions of immigration and asylum, in which Vance expressed doubts about the suitability of Afghan and Somali people for immigration to the US, even those who had assisted the US military overseas. At about 22 minutes into the recording, Vance mocked the claims of Afghan refugees to have helped the US military in its occupation, saying: “Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter.” Vance added, however, that “a lot of the interpreters who said they were helping us were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”, without substantiating the claim.
At about 25 minutes into the recording, Solheim said: “There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu. Like that’s what they call it. There’s nothing in English. People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.” Replying, Vance said: “The thing that I hate about this is the left uses racism as a cudgel. And I myself was guilty of being a little worried about that. Like, I don’t want to be called a racist because I knew it can be career-ending and they can destroy a person’s life.”
Several times, the three steered assessments of migrant groups and their capacity for assimilation into negative personal commentary on the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Vance replied, “I mean, [the US] gave her an incredible amount of opportunity and she has a complete lack of gratitude,” later adding: “My family has been here as far as I can tell for nine, 10, like many generations. I’ve never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country. And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me,” Vance allowed. “But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too,” he concluded.
Congresswoman Omar’s full response to the Guardian took Vance to task over the comments. “The ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance is not just troubling - it’s dangerous and un-American. I love America fiercely, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” she wrote.
Health Concerns About Diet Soda
Diet Mountain Dew contains artificial sweeteners like aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose. The FDA considers all three of the sweeteners to be “generally recognized as safe,” but manufacturers don’t need to present significant, peer-reviewed research in order to get a food additive into that category, Dr. “The assessments of aspartame have indicated that, while safety is not a major concern at the doses which are commonly used, potential effects have been described that need to be investigated by more and better studies,” noted the WHO’s director of the Department of Nutrition of Food Safety, Dr. “There was a recent study on links to cardiovascular disease that included these three sweeteners,” Stoiber says, pointing to the 2023 observational study which found an association between aspartame and stroke, and between acesulfame potassium and sucralose with higher coronary artery disease risk.
The artificial color of yellow 5, otherwise known as tatrazine, meanwhile, has been flagged, she says, “especially for young children,” because of “numerous epidemiological studies” showing an association with behavioral changes including irritability, restlessness, depression and difficulty with sleeping. Other controversial ingredients include the preservative calcium disodium EDTA, a slightly salty powder that’s been found to be related to digestive issues if consumed in very high amounts; and the additive sodium benzoate, which has been associated (without evidence of cause and effect), through various studies, with children’s hyperactivity, increased anxiety, hormone level disruption, and disrupted liver and kidney function, according to a 2022 study published in Nutrients.
It’s why drinking sodas either with sugar or artificial sweeteners is “a poor role model for the young whose habits are forming,” according to Alice H. Lichtenstein, professor of nutrition science and senior scientist at the Tufts University Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. “It is better to never start drinking sweetened beverages than to have to shift away from them.”