I live in a predominately Republican neighborhood located in one of the most heavily Republican-leaning voting precincts (Barton Creek) in north Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina. This is the kind of affluent, lushly landscaped neighborhood where the majority of folks are not inclined to put up political yard signs in their yards or bumper stickers on their cars - but nonetheless there is a notable portion who do, and a half-dozen McCain yard signs sprouted this past week scattered around the hood, and no Obama signs. In short, it's the kind of place where it's easy to assume cautiously that the overwhelming majority of your neighbors are firmly in the GOP camp and likely McCain voters, and the best you'd accomplish by planting an "Obama" yard sign is to be regarded as a mildly obstreperous iconoclast who may a decent-enough seeming neighbor most of the time, but is now revealed to be a hopelessly wrong-thinking pudding-head worthy of a bit of scorn too. [More after the break]
And so, at first, my wife (who also supports Obama) was hesitant about the idea of putting up an Obama yard sign. What the heck are we going to accomplish, she said, except to convince our overwhelmingly GOP-inclined neighbors that we're weird? We're not going to persuade anyone to vote differently, she said.
I have to admit that I've long felt that in this media/internet age, planting a political yard sign in your yard is useless to persuade anyone else to vote for your candidate at the federal office level, especially Presidential. I did think they could be more effective in local elections for nominally nonpartisan offices, where familiarity with candidates might otherwise fly below the radar of even enough profile on the local media screen. But at the federal or major state level, all they do is to give some peer reinforcement to the already committed to vote your way anyway.
EXACTLY! DON'T OVERLOOK THE IMPORTANCE OF PEER-REINFORCEMENT IF YOU'RE IN A HEAVILY GOP-INCLINED NEIGHBORHOOD! After I put up our yard sign Thursday on a street with lots of intra-neighborhood walking and car traffic, I noticed a neighbor down the street whom I don't really know had ALSO now put up an Obama sign. Soon after I put up my own sign, I had a conversation with my across-the-street neighbor, with whom I've never had a political conversation before - and discovered he's an Obama voter too. Ditto another neighbor a few doors down, who I've talked with on other matters a few times, but who saw me out in my yard while he was driving home, and took the trouble to stop a moment and say he was glad to see my sign, he was an Obama supporter too! In one case, the neighbor's wife was still undecided, and it's realistic to think that seeing that her husband would not be the isolated exception in an area (and possibly work enviornment too) swimmning with McCain voters - will help shore up her potential inclination to wind up in the Obama column too come election day.
In many ways, it can actually be MORE valuable to take the initiative in your neighborhood to be among the first to put up an Obama sign (especially if the signs in your hood are mostly McCain so far) than to add a "me too" sign in an overwhelmingly democratic-leaning neighborhood.
So this year may be the exception where a Presidential-candidate yard sign for Obama isn't simply the equivalent of a vanity license plate on your car - it might, for once, actually be effective in helping shore up a few more votes for Obama. The Obama votes in mostly GOP precincts will count just as much toward the state's outcome as those from Dem-leaning precincts.