How much did Big Booze spend on the 2024 election?

Plus: The oral history of the "FUCK AB-INBEV" shirt!

Money in politics: it’s a thing, and it’s suffocating democracy beneath an avalanche of billionaire cranks’ cash. Not ideal. One small silver lining is that federal campaign finance laws haven’t been gutted beyond utility (yet), so we can get still some sense for how corporations and trade groups are spending money to influence elections. To that end, I’ve compiled the 2024 federal campaign donations of the political action committees (PAC) associated with each of the biggest players in the American beer, wine, and spirits markets using data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research platform.

Some of these corporate PACs have very dumb names; others, like SAZERACPAC, are basically perfect. Regardless, they all plowed a bunch of your hard-earned drinking dollars into this year’s federal races via contributions to Congressional candidates, other PACs, and so on. Here’s how much Big Booze spent on the 2024 election—or, more precisely, how much its heaviest hitters’ PACs were required to disclosed. Oh, and please enjoy the charts, I worked really hard on them.