We want to hear from you.
Welcome to the first edition of Ask Fort Bend, a lovely little spot where I pose the questions and you get to tell me your opinion. Who doesn’t love that?
As long as I’ve been in politics, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with political signs. When I was a young reporter, I would actually look forward to them popping up ahead of the primaries. They were the unofficial signal that campaign season had truly arrived, a corrugated plastic form of democracy. But by the time November rolled around, I was more than ready for them to disappear. The novelty wears off quickly when every major intersection starts looking like a sign graveyard. Looking at you Sugar Land.
Then there is the nonsense, the destroying and stealing of political signs. Fort Bend has not been immune.
The rules in Texas allow signs to go up 90 days before an election and stay up until 10 days after. That’s roughly 200 days in an election year where our roadsides, medians, and fences become political billboards. Not to mention the polling places, they are so chaotic! That’s a long time we’re navigating a sea of campaign slogans, bold fonts, and carefully chosen color schemes. Luckily, most candidates don’t put their signs up for the whole 90 days.
But here’s the reality: candidates and the companies (read: two guys with a truck and a sledgehammer) they hire aren’t always great at retrieving every last sign. Some get blown into ditches. Some fade in the sun. Some linger awkwardly months after the votes have been counted, like leftover party decorations no one bothered to take down.
So what are your thoughts?
- Do political signs actually influence your vote?
- Do they serve as helpful reminders to get to the polls?
- Do they build name recognition in a meaningful way?
- Or are they just acceptable roadside noise we’ve all collectively agreed to tolerate?
- Looking at this from an environmental standpoint, can we justify the one time use of corrugated plastic?
Tell me what you think! But before you do that, I want to tell you a campaign sign vandalism story that I still find humorous. It was 2013, Republican Mike Pantelides was running for mayor of Annapolis. He had signs all over the city with the slogan, “Sweep Annapolis Clean” and had actually attached brooms to his signs which I thought was clever. Someone else thought they were clever and went and cut out the ELD letters out which left them saying PANTIES. I don’t condone sign vandalism but I still giggle when I think about that.