Still proud of the loser?
Shirts, stickers and more wind up on secondhand market or in trash — but some may end in museum
Election swag ends up on market, in museums.
Buttons, shirts and bumper stickers heralding the failed presidential ambitions of Sen. Kamala Harris are gathering dust inside a warehouse in Texas. Among lava lamps and incense sticks, a retailer in Connecticut still offers shirts that cry “Jeb!”
And for years after Mitt Romney’s 2012 quest for the White House ended, fading campaign hats and shirts resurfaced on the streets of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
For decades, U.S. presidential campaigns have churned out enormous quantities of swag — $5 buttons, $15 mugs, $75 guacamole bowls — to promote candidates, fill campaign coffers and gather sophisticated data about supporters.
Less attention has been paid, however, to what happens to all those things after most of those campaigns end, sometimes abruptly.
Many campaigns do not have a plan for what they leave behind. With Saturday’s South Carolina primary fast approaching, and about a third of all delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday, March 3, some of the eight candidates still seeking the Democratic nomination could find themselves confronting that problem soon.
“You literally go from building a multimillion-dollar startup to being shut down overnight,” said Matt Terrill, former chief of staff for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign, which gave many leftover shirts to volunteers. “It’s a lot easier to have people help you when you win to shut down a campaign.”
Surplus items often end up in storage or in the homes of staff members and volunteers. Some are given a second life with a new campaign. Most are thought to be recycled or thrown away.
“If somebody doesn’t deliberately collect them or hold on to them, almost all of it disappears,” said Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the National Museum of American History who collects presidential campaign memorabilia for the museum.
The Harris campaign placed a bulk order for merchandise in the summer, said Shelby Cole, who was digital director of Harris’ campaign. The plan was to distribute the items to campaign teams nationwide. But before they could, Harris, a senator from California, dropped out.
“All of our staff was pretty much caught by total surprise,” Cole said. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do with all these shirts?’ ”
Cole said the vendor the Harris campaign had hired, Bumperactive, offered to store the items in a warehouse and that they had been there for months. The merchandise is not marked with the year 2020, so it could in theory be used for Harris’ future campaigns, Cole said.
Harris’ office said there were plans to recycle the items but offered no specifics. Kyle Johnson, owner of Bumperactive, declined to comment.
At times, vendors that print shirts and other items are left with the surplus stock. The retailer in Connecticut, Old Glory, still offers items printed for Jeb Bush, John McCain and other bygone candidates.
“It’s just in our warehouse, sitting on a shelf,” said Austin Braumann, a district manager for the company. “What ends up happening is you either leave it up online and you can sell it, or you can donate it or throw it away.”
Several hundred shirts and hats promoting Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign wound up in Kenya after a former county campaign director in Tennessee donated the items to a charity run by his aunt.
The former campaign official, Alexander Waters, recalled thinking after the election, “Instead of someone selling them on eBay for $5 down the road, how can we turn this boon into something that can change someone’s life?”