In the 1993 movie The Fugitive, Harrison Ford’s character, cornered by Tommy Lee Jones’s character, jumps off the towering Cheoah Dam in Graham County, North Carolina (that fills in for what is supposed to be rural Illinois). He ends up, implausibly, alive but very wet — an extraordinary accomplishment, given the height of the dam and the dryness of Graham County.
Graham is the last dry county in North Carolina, but not for long. The public there on Election Day voted 53% to 47% to allow beer and wine sales inside Robbinsville, the county seat and the home to Cheoah Dam.
Graham County first voted to ban alcohol sales in 1948, 15 years after Prohibition ended. “Wine is a mocker,” read one church sign. “Those deceived are not wise.”
Floridians in Miami Beach, meanwhile, are looking into getting a little bit less sloshed. Voters there approved a nonbinding straw poll, 56% to 43%, recommending bars close at 2 a.m. instead of 5 a.m. Drinking until the sun comes up was mainly a problem in South Beach, a neighborhood famous for horrible bars with mediocre margaritas, in which your paper straw dissolves as you realize you are paying $19 a drink.
But when the original ballot measure suggested a mandatory earlier close in that hip neighborhood, Miamians began to worry about ripple effects: What would all the drunkards do at 2 a.m. when Sandbar Lounge closes? They’ll wander into another neighborhood, where maybe people sometimes expect to get some sleep before sunrise. So, the ballot measure was expanded to recommend all bars across Miami close at the early hour of 2 a.m.
Back in 2017, Miami voters rejected the idea, but since then, things have changed. While most of the country locked down in 2020 and 2021, Florida didn’t, so those looking for places to party took their talents to South Beach. Crime, which has risen across the country, might also make the issue more salient.
It becomes a more loaded issue when you throw in the cultural differences: Latin American and black youth may keep later hours than your average white adult.
In the end, the moderates won: Miami Beach will be a bit drier, and Robbinsville will be a bit less dry.
