A while back, I wrote this post about yard signs. But, a couple more thoughts have occurred to me on the subject.
On August 5th, the morning after the primary election in Michigan, just a few days ago, I went out for my morning run. During that run, I ran past a couple of yard signs, for political candidates, who had surely either won or lost their bids on the previous day. As I ran by, I got to thinking about those political signs, and how often you end up seeing them up for a significant amount of time –days, weeks even– after the election has come and gone.
I’ve often wondered why that is.
Now of course, the other day was just a primary, and so perhaps, the signs get left up because the general election is still a few months away. Or, maybe, the signs of winners are left up, as if the property owner hopes to associate themselves with the winners, as if to linger on the pleasant aroma of the victory. But, if either of those were the case, then you would at least expect half of the signs (the signs belonging to the losing candidates) to disappear as quickly as the votes get counted.
I mean, think about how you feel, wearing your favorite piece of team gear, on the day after your team gets destroyed by an opponent. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather wear that pink paisley button-down shirt that hides in the back of my closet; at least it doesn’t advertise my association with the losers.
Of course, when my team wins, now that’s a different story. Wild horses couldn’t keep me from wearing the shirt or the jersey or the jacket that shows that my team is the team that won.
And, while I’m on this subject, have you ever noticed that there are some people who, on the day after a defeat, will wear their team gear on purpose. I don’t know what to think about those people. Aren’t they just inviting the ridicule? Are they just gluttons for punishment? Or, maybe they are daring someone to say something to them about the game, so they might be provided with the opportunity to launch the sum of all the general rage and hate that they felt on some poor unsuspecting schmuck?
In any case, something doesn’t add up, because none of the theories that I seem to come up with, to try to explain why it is that yard signs for political candidates don’t come down when you think they ought to, none of my theories works often enough to make me think that any one theory is right.
There must be something else going on.
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In the previous post that I linked above, I wrote about a certain property that I pass on my way to work everyday, and about the number of political yard signs that they have, and the affiliations that I make in my mind about certain candidates that are being advertised by this property owner, alongside other candidates.
If you care enough to read the previous post, you might get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
In any case, it occurred to me today that this property owner was pulling for three political candidates to gain office, according to their yard signs. One of them was a local candidate running for a local office, the second was a local candidate running for a federal office, and the third candidate didn’t have any elections to win or lose on Tuesday (if you catch my drift).
Of the three that this property owner was pulling for, two of them lost on Tuesday. The only one who didn’t lose, could not have lost on Tuesday.
Of the two, I certainly feel worst for the local candidate running for the local office. While I didn’t vote for him –not because of the affiliations that existed on someone else’s front lawn, but rather, because I had someone I preferred to vote for– I wonder if there may have been some fallout from the national political scene that affected this individual.
I think they call this the coattail effect, whereby a popular candidate of a certain party is likely to be a benefit to other members of the same party. When the opposite is true, and unpopular candidates adversely affect the chances of their fellows, they call it the negative coattail effect.
Consider how badly Barry Goldwater did in 1964; he performed so poorly as the Republican candidate for the Presidency, that multiple Republicans in the House of Representatives also lost their seats. This allowed for Lyndon Johnson to have a Democratic majority to work with in accomplishing his goals. The negative coattail effect.
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I saw something, this past Tuesday night, that caught me off-guard, having to do with election-specific yard signs.
Our local library attempted, this past Tuesday, to get a “YES” vote on a millage for their funding. Because our community loves its library, they ended up getting the votes without much of a contest.
Before the evening was even over on Tuesday night, I noticed a neighbor of ours –whose husband volunteers for the library– walking over to the property of a different neighbor of ours, to retrieve a sign from their front lawn, asking voters to vote “YES” on the millage for the library.
Once it occurred to me that my neighbor was just being ‘neighborly’ as she collected the sign that was sure to be returned to the library for its purposes, whatever those might be, I started thinking about the importance of political yard signs in general.
Not everyone posts them, and I think that’s probably the case because candidate politics is not important enough for many people to take a position on, one way or the other. However, taking a stand on an issue –say, a millage for a public institution– is easier for people to commit to. It’s much more likely that supporting one’s local library is going to be the right thing to do next week, and next month, and next year, and ten years from now.
In my particular neck of the woods, you are much more likely to see political yard signs that support a particular issue on someone’s property than you are to see a property that is decked out in candidate signs.
Supporting XYZ political candidate is just not as solid of a position to take, keeping in mind how inconsistent most people –especially politicians– are.
It Occurred To Me Today 