Election Night Cocktails

It's about hedging risk. You just need a strategy.

It’s almost election night. You might want a drink. Possibly even two.

I typically don’t write about politics in this newsletter. There are plenty of excellent magazines and newspapers and Substacks for that.

But the folks at Slate asked me to write about election night drinking: How to think about it, and what drinks to make. So I did.

My main argument is that election night drinking is about hedging risk. You want a guarantee of something delightful and delicious no matter what happens. And then you need a strategy, with a drink that fits your use-case. I offer three, all of which revolve around drinks that will probably be familiar to readers of this newsletter.

I also write a little bit about the history of cocktails as political commentary. Here’s a sample:

Election-night drinking, in other words, is about hedging risk. And to do that, you need a strategy, a plan, a theory of the case. Some rock-solid cocktail recipes will help too.

I speak from experience. For the past four years, I’ve been writing a Substack newsletter about making craft cocktails at home. In general, I try to avoid politics in the newsletter, since good cocktails should bring people together, and politics tends to tear them apart. But in my day job, I work as a writer and editor at Reason, a libertarian political magazine. And I got my start making serious cocktails as a way to bring friends together while mitigating frustration and exasperation with high-stakes political events. And what I can tell you is that making well-crafted, quality drinks for yourself and your friends can be a fun and even funny way to take the edge off of a rough political night—or to celebrate a good one.

There’s some history here, too. Cocktails have long been part of America’s political discourse: As far back as the 1800s, cocktail bartenders gave drinks politically charged names, like the Moral Suasion, a response to the era’s temperance advocates, and the Fiscal Agent, a jab at America’s early tax collectors. The 1900s brought drinks like the Remember the Maine, a sort of cherry-forward Manhattan that referred to a sunken U.S. battleship. Today, the tradition continues every time a bartender makes a coconut drink as a nod to Kamala Harris. Cocktails have long been part of our political discourse.

On election night, you can take this idea and run—or at least imbibe—with it at home, making your drinks and serving them to friends with whatever name you want.

Read the whole thing here.

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