Our Obama sign got taken from in front of our house after 5 days. In 2004 our Kerry sign was also gone in less than a week. And in 2000 the Gore sign.
Both those elections, I read local articles about Democratic signs being taken (I haven’t read any this year but haven’t read the local paper recently either). In fact, one year they got a photo of a local Republican campaign worker loading someone’s sign into a van crammed full of them, which created a minor upset.
Meanwhile, all the McCain signs I have noticed have been up for weeks, and I haven’t noticed any disappearing.
No doubt there are Dopers that think it happens but do not know of any specific cases. I am curious whether any Dopers actually know of specific cases of Republican signs being stolen.
I don’t know if Dem signs are the only ones that get stolen, but a local pol’s Repub sign showed up uninvited in my front yard last election (the house was for sale, vacant, and on a busy street).
Maybe its the law of conservation of political signage.
I witnessed McCain/Palin sign being taken from the yard of a business. When I asked the man taking the sign if he owned the property he told me to f888 off.
I got his license number and reported it to the police but they said the property owner would need to file the complaint.
Napier, I imagine that from your location (Mid-Atlantic) you’re in a solidly blue state. The GOP supporters in your state have probably long given up on turning the state red, and are acting out their frustration. I’m guessing that GOP campaign signs disappear in Texas and Oklahoma all the time.
My parents had their Bush/Cheney sign stolen twice in 2004. They live in Michigan, which has become a lot more liberal in recent times. I’m not sure if they have a McCain/Palin sign, though.
>Napier, I imagine that from your location (Mid-Atlantic) you’re in a solidly blue state.
An interesting point. For the record I’m in a very consistently blue state, but a consistently red county in that state. In fact, my Dem sign is actually the only Dem sign I know of in my county, though I haven’t looked around for them much. I do, though, have a 15 mile commute entirely in my county, all of it on residential roads, and I often find myself noticing GOP signs and wondering where the Dem signs are as I drive, so at least there is a great preponderance of GOP signs.
I heard a pundit recently remarking that the recent shift towards Obama in the polls may reflect undecideds that were noticing their neighbors and coworkers advertising for Obama and legitimizing a candidate they themselves didn’t know. Good reason to put up signs, I thought. On the other hand, since my state was already practically in the bag, donations are probably much more effective than signs, for my interest.
In my Oklahoma college town, there are reports from both sides of signs being stolen or otherwise vandalized, and recently, a rock was thrown through the plate glass window of the county republican party office.
An office-mate of mine has a Bush 2004 sign stashed next to his desk. He’s an extreme liberal, so I strongly doubt that he got it for displaying in his own yard (well, aside from the fact that he doesn’t have a yard).
When I was in High School, in rural Virginia, a friend of mine’s dad was running for local office. He was actually running for some sort of city council position (or something like that) and I think back then, for those sort of positions, you didn’t really campaign “as a Republican” or a “Democrat” just as yourself with no real party affiliation (whatever party affiliation there was, was not made obvious from the signage.)
In any case, to play a prank on him and his dad, one day me and all my high school buds went driving through town late one night in a pickup truck. We proceeded to rip up every political sign in town we could find (this was a town of ~9,000 people or so.) Some Republican, some Dem, some “House for Sale” signs and et cetera.
Near three in the morning we snuck onto my friend’s yard and put every sign we had collected (a heaping pickup full of them) into his front yard. Apparently when his dad got up that morning he flipped shit.
My lawn signs are regularly knocked down, usually on halloween night. But I live about 2 blocks down from a high school. The signs are never stolen, just knocked down (or maybe tossed in a neighbor’s lawn down the street). But I attribute that to rowdy high schoolers, not political operatives.
I live in a very very blue city, in a state that’s been reliably red but up for grabs this year.
Down the street from me, in the lead-up to the 2004 election, a guy put up a set of four flags and a full-size cutout of George Bush in his yard. This was repeatedly vandalized.
I approve of this legally questionable activity.