Coffee Drinkers

Coffee Drinkers function as a diffuse electoral constituency invoked by politicians and staff to measure the visceral limits of doctrinal or technical policy positions. They stand for everyday consumers whose private habits translate into immediate political sensitivity; here President Bartlet names them to puncture a nominee's strict textualism, imagining a cream ban to expose real-world costs. Rarely individuated, they operate as a rhetorical barometer—shaping messaging, testing pragmatic tradeoffs, and reminding elites that popular habits can decisively reorder political calculations.