If you like Cherry Coke, your local politician will smile and nod, blithely registering your support for Coke over Pepsi. If you like grapefruit juice, your local politician will tell you to FOAD, knowing with full confidence that he or she already got elected without your support, and you're not likely to support anyone that stands a chance of beating them, so there's no need to do anything to court you.

Non-cola-likers have always fared better with protest demonstrations, news media publicity, and rights-based lawsuits. Voting has done nothing.

With the entrenched structure of the system in place, any issue that is not likely to switch your vote from Coke to Pepsi, or vice versa, can be safely ignored. Don't like that much sugar/HFCS? Ignored. Don't like carbonation? Ignored. Don't like caramel color? Ignored. Don't like phosphoric acid? Ignored. But if you like Cherry Coke better than regular Coke, well then Pepsi might just trial-run a Lemon Pepsi! Do I vote for that because it is closer to grapefruit juice than anything else on the ballot, or not vote for it because it's still just another falalahking cola?

The only group likely to make even a tiny dent in the status quo of Beverageland is the people who like coffee. But coffee never stands for election. Nobody ever even considers that coffee might be better than any cola. What does this mean metaphorically? I don't know; it ran away from me there.