Camera in hand, I hopped down from the car. As I focused the lens to catch the array of flags and campaign signs, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A neighborhood woman stood near my car, hastily scribbling something on a notepad. It’s not until later, as she trails my car around twists and turns, that I realize she was writing down my license plate number. I never found out exactly why I was followed, but one thing was evident—parts of Connecticut are brimming with paranoia and hostility approaching this election season.
Walking through Yale’s campus, the absence of campaign signs is stark. Yale has declared that “no campaign-related materials may be displayed externally on a university facility or in any university office or work space,” but even the larger New Haven area hardly bears any flags. People may be less willing to advertise their beliefs; perhaps within a small community such as Yale, the potential of ostracizing others with strong political markers is too high.
As I drove the twenty minutes to Woodbridge, I only spotted the occasional American flag. Upon arrival, it was a different story. Flags and campaign signs from both sides of the political spectrum were plentiful. Signage spanned from traditional campaign signs to flags professing support for the Blue Lives Matter Movement or declaring that “Hate has no home here.”
Interestingly, individual neighborhoods in Woodbridge seem to be either brimming with flags and campaign markers, or completely void of them. I find it eerie passing from street to street, seeing either uniformly empty lawns or full-blown neighborhood political expression. This arrangement raises the question of what drives people to put up these markers of political identity—do people only display signs to disagree with their neighbors? Or do politically conscious residents just tend to choose the same neighborhoods to live in?
Democrats seemed to have mostly Harris-Walz signs on their yards, whereas the Republican houses I saw had an array of flags: not just Trump flags but also Blue Lives Matter, Red Lives Matter, and American flags. This observation questions the idea of patriotism—when I see an American flag on a house, I associate it with Republicans—does this suggest that patriotism leans Republican? As I drive through neighborhoods of flag-lined drives, I reflect that in recent years Republicans have grown towards nationalist, American-based signage, whereas Democrats have distanced themselves, perhaps not wanting to associate with what they believe to be a complicated history.
Yard signs are often described as an effective tool for increasing political candidates’ chances, although study results are mixed. Green et. al. suggests that these signs can provide name exposure and viability (by demonstrating that the candidate’s campaign has the resources to create and distribute signs) as well as indicating partisan affiliation. Perhaps Woodbridge residents are deploying yard signage to help their favored candidates; it may foster a greater sense of civic efficacy by giving them something to do beyond voting.
This line of thought brings me back to the question of what drives people to put up political signage. Another possibility is to signal one’s political identity or assert allegiances in a hyper-local political faceoff. Republicans are the minority in Woodbridge and in Connecticut as a whole, yet I counted more conservative signs and flags than I did Democratic ones. Perhaps Republicans are hoping to exhibit their political identity in order to normalize their political affiliation and show others that it is acceptable to vote in accordance, or perhaps it’s a case of neighborly competition. There’s no telling which signs were placed first, but maybe the Democrat signage I saw was intended to counter the Republican ones, or vice versa.
Maybe this idea could help to account for the stark lack of flags in New Haven—perhaps the large Democratic majority subsumes the need for signage.