The Political Power of the Wine Mom
But, most often, she is Wine Mom. A recent stroll through my social-media feeds turns up the “normie resist lib wine mom,” the “Occupy Democrats menopausal wine mom,” and the “MSNBC wine mom final boss.” Her electoral manifestation is, often, the “hot suburban wine mom,” whose composite is a former federal prosecutor who styles her honey-highlighted hair in mid-shaft waves, has four kids, and is exactly forty-seven years old. (In November, when Democrats prevailed in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, the liberal commentator Jill Filipovic characterized the winners as a “moderate former CIA wine mom” and a “moderate former Navy wine mom,” respectively.) Currently, she is most prominently embodied as the “based wine mom,” exemplified by Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan of the “I’ve Had It” podcast, and typically understood as a onetime mainstream liberal who has moved dramatically leftward in response to the milquetoast centrism of Kamala Harris’s failed Presidential campaign, the cruelty and chaos of the second Trump Administration, and the fecklessness of the nominal Democratic opposition.
In short, the semiotics of the wine mom are complex. She is always embarrassing to someone, to some degree; otherwise, she takes so many forms that she may be formless. At the very least, the “wine mom” label—whether intended as a mark of disgrace or condescension, or as an ironic term of endearment—is a useful shorthand for a politically activated and well-organized cohort, one that votes for left-leaning candidates in much higher numbers than the working-class diner patrons or disaffected young men on whom Democratic leaders tend to fixate. The results of the upcoming midterm elections, in fact, may depend in large part on wine moms—whoever they may be, whatever they may drink.
The wine mom first became a household name not as a political actor but as a marketing concept. An epochal moment arrived in 2011, in the era of the mommy blog, when the then popular website Moms Who Need Wine teamed up with the California Wine Club for a subscription program known as the Wine Mom Series. According to the site’s founder, Marile Borden, this branding opportunity reflected a newfound honesty among women about the frazzling demands of motherhood. “Moms are becoming much more real in terms of admitting that the job is a difficult one and that a nice glass of wine at the end of the day sure helps,” Borden told the Associated Press. The Wine Mom series included brands with names such as Girls’ Night Out, Mad Housewife, and Middle Sister; another of the featured wines, MommyJuice, faced accusations of trademark infringement from a competitor, Mommy’s Time Out. (They eventually settled out of court.)
By 2015, the wine mom had been packaged in books (e.g., “The Three-Martini Playdate”), meme-ified by an “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch, and declared passé by a Chicago Tribune columnist (“Wine-swilling mom trope ready for retirement”). The term didn’t acquire a distinct political valence until the first Trump Administration, as large numbers of center-left suburban women were drawn toward political activism, gaining national prominence through umbrella mobilization groups such as Red Wine & Blue. Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard, argued in a 2018 piece for the journal Democracy that newly galvanized legions of middle-aged, left-to-center women were “fueling an American political transformation,” drawing on Putnam’s research in Pennsylvania and Skocpol’s field work across eight counties in four swing states. By Skocpol’s count, about twenty-five hundred women-led grassroots resistance groups formed during Trump’s first term.
Toward the end of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, some liberal commentators were discovering “wine mom” as a rhetorical means of dividing what they saw as the reasonable center from the belligerent Democratic Socialists of America set. A Daily News contributor lamented the “Bernie Bros’ bullying of the neoliberal, Hillary-bot wine moms of the world”; an op-ed in the Boston Globe grieved the Sanders supporters’ “open disdain for the bougie, suburban ‘wine mom’ voters.” As a political smear, “ ‘wine mom’ got picked up first by a self-identified left that’s more online, more ideological, often younger, often less female, to argue that you middle-aged women are doing politics wrong,” Putnam told me. “It’s been striking, in Trump 2.0, to see the online right picking up the idea of the wine mom as something they need to be attacking or criticizing.” (Tucker Carlson got ahead of this curve back in 2022, when he disparaged then Vice-President Harris as a “low-I.Q. wine mom.”)
