Rural sign wars of the 2020 election
While I have seen innumerable Donald Trump yard signs in rural Iowa, this one startled me the first day I saw it when it appeared in August next to a bean field near Attica, about an hour’s drive southeast of Des Moines. It was the size of a sheet of plywood, and said, “Trump 2020: No More Bull----” (without the hyphens, to be clear).
I live in southern Marion County, and if I want to go to the grocery or hardware store I have a choice of four towns I can drive to, each about 20 miles away; Knoxville, Pella, Oskaloosa or Albia. Before the 2016 elections, the only political yard signs for president I remember seeing on these routes were Trump signs. I would have to have been in one of our rural towns to see a Hillary Clinton sign, and that didn’t happen very often. I think I actually saw more “Hillary for Prison” signs than “Hillary for President.”
Some political consultants say “yard signs don’t vote,” but neither do television commercials, radio ads, or Facebook posts. Research shows that yard signs help with name recognition, influence turnout, and reflect enthusiasm. Todd Makse, Scott Minkoff, and Anand Sokhey, in their 2019 book, “Politics on
Display, Yard Signs and the Politicization of Social Spaces,” make the case that yard signs are uniquely social. Donating and voting are done in private and are invisible, while yard signs are public statements.
When we see a yard sign, we may well know the person who owns the property, and the yard sign serves as an endorsement by someone we may well respect. If we don’t know the person, by looking at the property and buildings, we know something about the person living there; the kind of vehicle they drive, how they take care of their property, their socio-economic status and maybe even what they do for a living.
I think signs in the countryside are more influential than in the city. Our views in towns and cities are filled with innumerable signs of all kinds, and are a text-rich environment. It’s impossible to process all of the words one sees in even a short drive. Alternatively, on my text-poor routes, signs are few and far between, and if there are political yard signs, they are duly noted.
For those of us with 20-mile drives to work, we see the same signs every day.
Andrew Green, in his 2020 book
“From the Iowa Caucuses to the White House; Donald Trump’s 2016 Electoral Victory in Iowa,” discusses the importance of yard signs in Trump’s victory. Green says Trump Iowa campaign chair Eric Branstad told him the yard signs and other promotional materials were “literally gold”.
When signs became scarce, it “created an opportunity for enthusiastic Trump supporters to express their support by creating and displaying homemade yard signs.”
While Trump signs are more numerous on my rural wanders this election season, Biden signs have been popping up over the past couple of weeks in numbers that Clinton never attained.
Like in the big city, Trump and Biden signs are vandalized on occasion, and the sign near Attica is no exception. My daughter tells me it was spray-painted with words that said something like “love and peace.” A few days later, a Trump supporter responded with the spray-painted message, and here I quote exactly, “VOTE Trump. LAW an (sic) Order.”
Then it was joined by a piece of sheet metal painted black, and with yellow lettering that partially obscured Trump’s name.
The message? “LOVE ONE ANOTHER, JOHN 15.”