Casual observation shows Trump has the most signs.. but….
This past week, my father and I took a road trip across the country, from Texas to California, to visit my grandfather. As we are both political, we decided to play a bit of an observational game and see how each candidate’s supporters got out to put up signs and more. We came away with some interesting numbers.
From a week on the road, driving across four States, in red and blue areas, we saw that Trump easily had the most signs and bumper stickers. However, that isn’t the important story. Before we get to the real story, let’s look at the numbers. These are the total number of signs and bumper stickers for each major candidate we saw. These don’t count if one car had multiple stickers on it, we counted that as one.
Trump- 8
Gary Johnson- 5
Hillary Clinton- 1
Jill Stein- 1
Bernie Sanders- 2
At first observation, it looks like Trump easily won the ‘sign race’, but what jumped out to us was how few signs and bumper stickers for political candidates we saw. Our trip took us across Dallas, El Paso, Tucson, Palm Springs (and that area), Temecula (and surrounding cities), Oceanside to Long Beach, and a small part of L.A. (and back again).
We did see a lot of political signs, especially in California where every corner was dominated with signs for local races or ballot measures, yet for all candidates, there was simply no show of support for any of the Presidential candidates. Not on cars, not in front of houses, not in street corners, almost nothing. This same trend applied to red states and blue states as well as red and blue areas of those states. We actually saw almost as many left-over 2012 cycle stickers for Obama or Romney than we did for the major candidates in this election cycle. I remember observing in 2012 that people were putting Romney or Obama signs everywhere and loading up on bumper stickers. Now, on the thousands of houses, cars, and corners we saw, it was virtually empty of any activity for the Presidential race this cycle.
This may be a sign of lack of enthusiasm for the candidates or worse, frustration around them. I found with my family in California, who are staunch, old-school Republicans, that the only reason they may vote for Trump was to vote against Hillary- but they had no enthusiasm for him at all. This seems to be the same factor on the left with Hillary supporters voting for her simply to vote against Trump.
The other observation was , even though they weren’t leading the sticker race, as a percentage of what we saw, third party candidates had a much better showing than I expected. Johnson in particular had more than Hillary, Stein, and left-over Sanders combined.
As many people keep observing, this is a very strange election cycle.
