They’ve Got Their Minds, Lawns Made Up

The signs are in front yards all over this faded manufacturing town along the Ohio River. They are taped to porch columns and to the windows of the compact brick and Colonial houses here.

They are strewn along Chillicothe Street, the main thoroughfare in Portsmouth, where both major parties have rented previously abandoned storefronts on opposite sides of the street, and plastered them with signs.

The 2004 election has shaped up as a banner year for signs, and not just in this corner of the Midwest. Indeed, at the national level, the people who make the signs -- and the bumper stickers, and the buttons, say they have never experienced anything quite like the level of interest this year. That is especially true in battleground states, where the race is so tight that a leader is impossible to call.

“The upswing in demand is just off the charts,” said Ted Jackson, president of Louisville, Ky.-based Spalding Group, the principal supplier for the last five Republican presidential nominees.

“I mean, we are dealing with people who want to, who are happy to, spend their own money to show their neighbors and friends who they support in a very concrete way,” Jackson said.

In one indication of the intensity of feelings on both sides in this election, law-enforcement authorities say they have received hundreds of complaints of vandalism, including sign burning and car owners finding their bumper stickers plastered over with one for the other candidate.

Spot checks in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and Missouri all found county sheriffs fielding a high volume of complaints. In another example, Democratic and Republican officials in Minnesota have both recorded at least 700 incidents of signs being stolen or defaced. The state’s Republican party even set up a link on its website, called “When Angry Democrats Attack!” with photos of defaced Bush-Cheney signs.

Because many political signs are printed by private companies that wouldn’t divulge their numbers, it’s hard to get an exact fix on just how many are out there on American front lawns and windows.

But the companies that oversee two main websites producing campaign political material said their business was booming. Campaign workers here in Scioto County, where George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore four years ago, said there was an unprecedented level of citizen interest in the material.

“The stuff literally seems to be flying off the shelves; I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Joyce Childers, 63, a Democratic volunteer in Portsmouth.

“We got a box of 2,000 signs in here the other day, and they were gone within hours,” she said, “and people are still coming in to ask for them.”

She pointed almost apologetically to a small stack of “Seniors for Kerry-Edwards” bumper stickers.

“We’re out of the regular kind,” Childers said. “I tell people they can just cut off the ‘Seniors for’ if they want to.”

Down the street at the Republican headquarters, Jean Taylor, 75, a longtime GOP volunteer who sported “W ‘04” and “I Vote the Bible” buttons, also said she had run out of signs.

“I’ve got people in here begging for them,” said Taylor. “People are drawing them by hand. Bumper stickers -- I can’t keep them in here.”

With an unemployment rate of about 9%, Portsmouth is a town that has been in general decline since the Depression. Most big industry jobs -- in steel, iron, bricks, tobacco, coke-processing and shoe production -- are gradually disappearing from the area.

However, this corner of the state is full of political activity -- with evidence of a hard-fought presidential contest, and strong emotions, all around.

“The stakes seem so huge this year,” said Linda Carson, a decorative artist with a Kerry-Edwards sign on her lawn. “This is a really important election.”

Otto Poole, her neighbor, had a different opinion about whom to vote for, but concurred that it was important to demonstrate support for a candidate.

“Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion,” said Poole, a retired construction worker with a Bush-Cheney sign in his yard. “So why not express it?”

Indeed, many people in Portsmouth said they were putting a sign in their yard this year for the first time.

George Mosley is one such voter. A 68-year-old retiree from a local plant that is now shuttered, Mosley decided to put up a Kerry-Edwards sign.

“We have got to get George Bush out of office,” said Mosley, who has split his presidential votes in the past among the major-party candidates.

“He’s spent $87 billion for a war that was wrong. We’ve gone in and bombed people over there,” he added, referring to Iraq, “and now they hate us.”

Just around the corner, George Copen, a former engineer at a uranium-enrichment plant here, put up four signs just in front of his picket fence -- three for Republican candidates, including President Bush, and one urging a “yes” vote on a levy for school funding for the mentally handicapped.

Copen said the signs might just have some influence. “I mean, if somebody knows you personally and respects your judgment, maybe it will help them make a decision.”

Mosley, however, scoffed at the notion that his Kerry-Edwards sign would persuade anyone. “Really, it’s exactly like hanging an Ohio State Buckeyes pennant,” he said. “It’s just a way of telling people which team you’re rooting for.”

Certainly there were signs for many other candidates -- one farmhouse along the main highway into town had 11 signs out front. The Bush-Cheney banner was all but invisible among other slogans such as “Keep Johnson Coroner” and the “Re-Elect Opal Spears Commissioner.” One could almost miss the “Bush-Cheney ‘04” banner.

With all these signs and the intensity of interest this year, it is perhaps not surprising that there have been widespread vandalism reports.

On Chillicothe Street, the two volunteers at their party storefronts angrily accused the other party of destroying campaign material.

“It’s terrible, really,” said Childers, at Democratic headquarters, shaking her head. “The Republicans have destroyed signs, spray-painted over them, burned them.”

Taylor, at Republican headquarters, was no less upset about what was happening to Republican signs.

“Why, do you know that state patrolmen have caught these people stealing signs in the middle of the night?” she said. “And they’ll just go up to your car and put a Kerry bumper sticker right over the Bush one.”

In Portsmouth, there were certainly plenty of people who were looking forward to the day the signs come down. One of them is George Gardner, 54, a bricklayer.

“I’d like to see this election come and gone, quite frankly,” he said as he sat on his porch on Rhodes Avenue.

Christee Shepherd, who lives close by, said she finally laid down the law with her husband, a corrections officer.

“I told him two signs and that’s it,” she said. “Anything more than that, and it starts really interfering with the Halloween decorations.”