The Obama/Biden yard signs are $2.50 each via the website.
Hell I paid $3.00 each for the last ten bumper stickers at the local Obama office and thought it was pretty cool that Obama can charge and we happily pay. As for yard signs, they can’t be had for love or money in the Sacramento area. So yeah, I have a homemade one.
Sheesh…at my county Dem Party HQ, yard signs, bumper stickers and buttons are all free. You can donate if you like (and IME as a volunteer, most do). I’ve even taken a few bumper stickers and a yard sign to friends in other counties where they are scarce.
Could be that the Dems are going for all of the exposure we can get in a solid red state?..
I once worked on a campaign in a special election, held in January-February in Minnesota.
We had a supporter living on a dead-end street, directly next to a freeway noise wall, next to a heavily-traveled freeway. So we installed his yard sign about 25 feet in the air, just visible over the top of that freeway noise wall. (The posts on the sign were actually attached to the wall. If we had installed our own 25 foot high posts on his lawn, it would have been OK, I guess.)
But the campaign got a letter from the Highway Department, saying that it was not legal to have this sign attached to their wall, citing state law, and telling us that we would have to remove it, or their workers would remove it and bill us for the expense. They gave us a short deadline; it absolutely had to be removed by Feb. 12th.
The election date was Feb 10th.
(So we removed it the day after we won the election.
This was a special election, our new Senator took the place of the previous one, including serving on the same committees. One of those was the Transportation Budget Committee. Somehow I suspect that the Highway Department was aware of that when they sent that letter.)
http://store.barackobama.com/product_p/ys29682.htm
The actual “yard” sign with the metal piece is $8 from the Obama site. The regular signs like the ones you see people holding up at rallies are $2.50 and there are more choices for sayings on them.
This made me laugh . . .
Once again: there are no Obama yard signs because they are completely useless in winning an election. Money spent on worthless distractions like buttons, signs and bumper stickers is money not spent doing things that actually affect the election like hiring callers and buying ad time. Have some trust in the Obama campaign guys, they very obviously know what they are doing.
You know, I really may go out and get a pumpkin now. That’s a cool link. Don’t know if I’ll go for the Barack O’ Lantern, or the less detailed stencils.
Odd. My family and I spent yesterday canvassing in Erie PA and we saw a worker with yard signs at the campaign office. We asked how much one cost, and he said “nothing” and gave us one.
I got a car magnet with a donation to the campaign as well – that took about 2.5 weeks to arrive. My MoveOn.org bumper sticker, though, took FORVER to get here.
Well, obviously, they do “cost” somebody money.
The question is whether a campaign will absorb that cost, and give them out for free, or will the campaign ask their supporters to donate something toward that cost. That gets into calculations of how much the publicity from signs is worth, vs. all the other possible uses of that money, and which ones the campaign managers think is most needed.
Often groups will buy signs and distribute them, either free or asking for donations. It’s common for unions to buy signs supporting their endorsed candidate, and give them to their members for free. Our local party unit bought 1000 Obama-Biden bumper stickers & 500 lawn signs. We sold some of these at events, like the debates. Others we gave to volunteers who had worked on the campaign. And we gave them out for free to people who lived at high-visibility locations. We wanted to get them all out and visible for the last 2 weeks.
About the cost:
Having purchased them, the corrugated plastic ones cost about $1.50-$3.00, depending on the number of colors and the sturdiness of the ground frame. That’s for small quantities, 250-1000 signs. No doubt it gets cheaper for bigger orders. And the plastic bag signs are cheaper yet (the U-shaped metal frame actually costs more than the sign). I’ve seen them for about $1 in quantity.
And the corrugated plastic ones can be reused for many things once the candidate retires. I have seen them used for covering insulation on a livestock barn lean-to, they make good composting containers (light & won’t rot), they work well to make a childrens sandbox, placed on the ground, they make effective weed barriers (and the metal frames work well for holding up tomato plants). And of course, here in Minneapolis, the garbage burner creates energy from them – being made of oil originally, they burn well.