Brewery Campaigns To Make Election Day A National Holiday, Via Beer Can
Calls to turn November 6th—which is Election Day, please tell me you knew that—into a national holiday have been around for years. But the campaign has a new, vocal, and perhaps unlikely backer: a brewery. Patchouge, New York-based Blue Point Brewery, which has been owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev since 2014, today took out a full-page ad in The New York Times promoting its Voters' Day Off beer.
The ad is styled as an open letter, encouraging drinkers "to rally our lawmakers to make Election Day a federal holiday so that all Americans have the same time and opportunity to vote." The ad also mentions Blue Point's Voters' Day Off beer, which includes a petition on the side of the can that consumers can sign and mail to Washington, D.C.—with appropriate postage of course. The can reads, in part: "We the people believe that voting is the heart and soul of democracy. ... I, ______, support the movement to establish an election day national holiday." Oh, and Blue Point is walking the walk, too: The brewery will give its employees November 6 off, according to a statement from Blue Point, and proceeds from the beer's sale benefit Rock The Vote.
Other details around Blue Point's campaign include the delivery of "a boat load" of signed Voter's Day Off cans to Congress later this month, and a promise to throw a huge happy-hour party in Central Park should Congress create the national holiday. (Don't hold your breath, folks.)
The campaign is a smart one for Blue Point. It makes the not-especially-trendy brewery a part of the national energy swirling around the midterm elections, but without the brewery having to take an unpopular or divisive political position. It's a nonpartisan but still political campaign, one that feels edgy but doesn't risk alienating people of any particular political persuasion. And it has a legitimate point, too: Nearly 60 percent of voting-age adults didn't vote in the last midterm election, citing work and school conflicts as the primary reason.
If you want to get your hands around a can of Voters' Day Off, you don't have a ton of options, though: It's available at the brewery's Patchouge, New York taproom and at select events this month.