Immediately after the NH primary, most of those campaign signs are supposed to vanish. Along the larger roads in my normal travels — the Spaulding Turnpike, Route 11, and places like that, most of the signs for various candidates are done. There have been signs for Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, John McCain, and Tom Tancredo in my normal travels. On primary day, some signs for Rudy Giuliani and Bill Richardson appeared.
All of those signs are gone now, having vanished within a day or two of the primary. I know from experience that the Mike Huckabee campaign has been asking for supporters to pick up signs and bring them back to the campaign office. This serves a few purposes — for one thing, we can use the signs again in other states. Meetup groups in Maine are asking for our signs already. Minimally, they can be cleaned up and recycled.
However, there are some signs still around. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney seem not to be overly-concerned about cleaning up their signs. Maybe their campaigns have enough money that they don’t need to conserve any for signs — but that doesn’t seem to have stopped Ron Paul’s people from cleaning up their signs.
Generally, whoever puts the signs out should be responsible for taking them back down. I assume that that’s why the Tancredo signs are down. Even though there isn’t a campaign anymore, someone knew that they were there and picked them up.
Not so with these four campaigns. I don’t suppose that there is a whole lot to be said about this — it might not indicate that much. It seems telling to me, though, to see who doesn’t care to clean up their own mess and is content to leave these (plastic and metal) signs to fall over into the road and get wrecked.
Just an observation …
