Who drinks beer? Everybody—as long as they’re over 21, of course. [Winks at the Fingers Legal Department, which does not exist.] But even in 2026, beer brands writ large still struggle to reflect this basic reality in their marketing efforts. Especially in 2026: just three years removed from the Bud Light fiasco, virtually every major macrobrewer has pulled back on diversity in internal hiring programs and consumer-facing campaigns.

There’s a moral case to be made that this sucks. (It sucks, lol.) There’s also a financial case: as Kate Bernot reported at Feel Goods Insights in 2024, demographic data dictate that “the average drinker will soon be a non-white woman.” The beer industry has made some progress pivoting towards that reality, but not nearly enough. It’s just one of many reasons that the sales draining from the “leaky bucket” of mass-market light beer often flow out of the category entirely.

Savvy beer marketers are already tackling this problem with affinity brands, populist gimmicks, and flavor-forward spinoffs that allow for more creative latitude. But at the trade’s highest level, too many execs are still stuck on keeping the white working-class drinker in the fold, or coaxing him back to it. It’s a doomed gambit for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that the working class is getting less white and male by the day.

There are a bunch of different ways to envision this shift. New findings from progressive polling shop Data For Progress offer a novel approach: cartoons.