The Politics of Lawn Signs

It's that time of the year. Lawn signs supporting various candidacies are going up near street fronts across the country, only to be defaced or stolen within days. Homeowners resort to tactics like cameras, lighting, and threatening notes to protect their political expression, but it's for naught. The more hotly contested the race, the more certain it is the sign will be stolen or destroyed.

Overly zealous partisans may have good fun stealing the signs of their opponents, without realizing it's a bad idea.

First of all, how do the signs get there? Often times the signs haven't even been deposited at the behest of the homeowner. People can sign up as campaign volunteers months or years ago, and then will find the sign put there by the campaigns without asking.

Why does this matter? It means that people who may not be hardcore partisans are assenting to having signs on their lawns.

Here's where stealing signs is ill-advised for the opposition. The signs serve more of a cathartic purpose for their owners than they move votes of undecideds. For races like US Senate, or the Presidency, the race is already so high visibility that lawn signs aren't going to be convincing anyone one way or the other.

Stealing the signs, however, denies their owners their sense of self-expression. When you do that, you turn somewhat committed, somewhat likely voters into certain voters, once they feel aggrieved by the opposition. If they were not 100% certain to brave bad weather or long lines to vote before you stole their sign, they sure will once you do.

Local races is where stealing signs can have a demonstrable desireable effect. Low visibility races can be decided by name identification, with lawn signs being a critical component. With those signs, chances are their owners had little attachment to them anyhow, and the name ID the candidates represented would've received is likely more valuable than the hardening of partisanship on behalf of the sign's owner. Go ahead and steal signs for state representative if you must steal signs. Not that I advocate that.