Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 62. Sunrise is 6:23 and sunset is 7:30 for 13 hours 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the war.
Each election season, Whitewater has its share of political yard signs throughout the city. A yard sign may simply represent a property owner’s expressed feelings, without any design to affect the outcome of an election. Political speech is often like this: speaking one’s mind.
As a practical matter, however, yard signs are a poor indicator of political outcomes in Whitewater.
First, it’s typical of local landlords (mostly if not exclusively right-leaning) to place yard signs for candidates on their properties. The location of these plentiful clusters, especially the ones on Main Street, are well-known to the community as student rental operators’ properties. (That is, they don’t represent the sentiments of the many residents therein, but instead of a few owners thereof.1) Anyone who’s been in town for more than a year sees this, so the many yard signs on rental properties are reasonably discounted as a false indicator of popular opinion.
Imagine the landlords’ thinking:
Behold, our utilitarian buildings lovely properties of multi-tenant individually-owned residences that will trick convince Whitewater’s voters as an astroturf a grassroots movement in favor of our latest set of disposable beloved catspaws candidates!
I’d guess that local landlords see the clustered placement of their preferred candidates’ yard signs as a significant electoral advantage for their candidates. It’s obviously not.
Second, yard signs are overrated even in a media desert like ours. As a form of campaign advertising, yard signs are a low-cost, but also a low-impact, medium. A study from Columbia University in 2016 suggests that yard signs influence vote share only slightly:
The study, “The Effect of Lawn Signs on Vote Outcomes: Results from Four Randomized Field Experiments,” provides what the authors conclude is the most comprehensive research on lawn sign effectiveness to date. The six researchers, led by Donald P. Green of Columbia University, worked with four campaigns in different electoral contexts to conduct four separate experiments. The experiments, together, focused on a total of 376 voting precincts in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The study’s findings include:
- After pooling the results of the four experiments and examining their averages, it appears that lawn signs raise vote shares, on average, by slightly more than 1 percentage point.
- Based on pooled results, lawn signs are “on par with other low-tech campaign tactics such as direct mail that generate … effects that tend to be small in magnitude.”
- Signs, in some scenarios, do not appear to be as effective when they make reference to a specific political party or ideology.
See Lauren Leatherby, Do election lawn signs generate votes? New research, Journalist’s Resource (March 25, 2016).
One percent is something, yet not a huge influence.
Yard signs are part of Americana, but they’re unlikely to change any races in Whitewater.
I’ll take a moment to discuss another medium that didn’t affect the Spring Election outcome. Social media in Whitewater, and that means Facebook, was ablaze in December and January with posts that suggested a significant right-leaning local trend. Relying on those winter posts would have been a false reliance on sincere but, as it predictably turned out, ephemeral sentiments. Facebook burns hot but fast. A steady candidate, holding his or her nerve, can weather a political torrent on social media. Neither fickle human nature nor an edgy algorithm keeps its focus for long.
The closer you look, the less you see. It’s all a matter of the proper perspective.
Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Newspapers, the Regents, Economic Demand, Trump on Daycare, Claims of Legacy, and a Particular Species of Democrat.
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- It’s still one person, one vote in Wisconsin, isn’t it? ↩︎
Secondhand sales of the iPod are surging: