It’s Not About Yard Signs, it’s About Registering Voters

Sean at Five Thirty Eight has a hilarious post up about the relative importance of yard signs in elections:

Organizers – the people out there killing themselves to win this election – hate yard signs with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

Barack Obama’s organizers hate them. John McCain’s organizers hate them. It’s because yard signs don’t vote – but they do generate a ridiculous amount of complaining that must be patiently listened to. Until yard signs sprout little legs and go to the polls on Election Day, in a presidential election with universal name recognition they are just a nice little decoration.

They’re little feel good things, making you feel like you’re on the team. There is nothing wrong with that – that’s not the objection. The objection is that there is limited time for organizers to accomplish a wide array of prioritized tasks, and in this election they’ve chosen to prioritize identifying, registering, persuading and getting their voters to the polls. Yard signs cut into the organizer’s sleep time – literally.

A lot of people aren’t going to like hearing this truth, but organizers recognize that the majority of people who walk into offices for yard signs are, for volunteering purposes – and this is a technical term – useless. In the majority, these people are not going to knock, they’re not going to make phone calls. Instead, they are going to throw the organizer’s incredibly precious, sleep-deprived time down a bottomless abyss of irretrievability.

So, in a nutshell. Here are the things you can do to help Barack Obama win the election:

• Donate money to the campaign.
• Take action to help the campaign.
• Direct your friends, family and everyone you know to Vote for Change to get them registered and ready to vote.

Yard signs are probably number 150 on the list. Get the point?

Written by Teresa Valdez Klein · Filed Under Politics