Volume 5, Issue 37: Kennedy and Heidi

"Switch seats with me."

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There is something charming, even endearing, to me about a political lawn sign. In an age where everyone seems to be shouting for your attention all the time, a political lawn sign just sits there, lo-fi and eternal, like a scrawl on a cave. I know there are people—you may well be one of these people—who are irritated by political lawn signs, who are already overwhelmed and exhausted by politics and the coming election, who have taken great pains to avoid it and thus who don’t appreciate having to be confronted by it constantly when they’re just trying to drive home from work. I am empathetic to this. Remember, I live in a swing state, which means I currently can’t watch a 20-second Illini football highlight without having to hear about the apparently infinite number of serial killers Kamala Harris has let out of prison or how J.D. Vance is hiding a tattoo of the complete Project 2025 platform under his beard. It’s relentless. I get wanting to have a few minutes away.

But the difference between firing off angry missives on social media and putting up a sign on your front lawn encouraging people to vote for your candidate of choice strikes me as vast. To stake your claim in front of your home, where you live, isn’t tossing more verbiage onto the endless heap like posting on social media is; it’s actively participating in the public square. It is putting your money where your mouth is, or, more accurately, it’s understanding that the political is personal—that you and the people who live in your community are together. Perhaps the candidate whose sign is on my lawn will win, or perhaps the candidate whose sign is on your lawn will. But whatever happens will affect both of us, as humans, as citizens, as neighbors. We have grown to isolate ourselves so much, to stay in our silos, to engage only with those who agree with us, to talk only to people who tell us what we want to hear. To put a sign in front of your house—the place where you sleep, and eat, and do laundry, and all those mundane essentials that accumulate to make up a life—that says “this is what we stand for, we would hope you will consider standing for it too” isn’t cynical propagandizing, or civic pollution. It’s an attempt to reach out. It’s an aim to connect.

This is true even if you have a different lawn sign in front of your house than I do. It’s especially true then.

I’ve only had a lawn since 2013, since we moved to Athens and bought the house we still live in. My parents, growing up in Illinois, never had a political sign on their lawn, if just because we lived so far out in the middle of nowhere that there would have been no point; nobody ever drove by our house anyway. Even though our house in Athens is located on a well-trafficked street, I didn’t anticipate ever putting one up, in large part because, for my first few years here, I was working as a real political journalist for Bloomberg Politics; it would have been inappropriate to actively promote a candidate I was at least theoretically covering.

Just because I was staying out of the lawn sign battles, though, doesn’t mean they weren’t happening.

Original post.

Staying out of it was my mindset back then, anyway, a mindset that got obliterated pretty quickly when the 2016 election turned out the way that it turned out. It suddenly didn’t feel honorable or ethical to “stay neutral,” whatever that even meant. It felt negligent. It was obvious that this era would be known forever as the Trump Era, that my kids would look back someday at an age they were (mercifully) too young to fully understand, and wonder what it was like for their parents during that time, just like I wonder what it was like for my parents to come of age during the tumultuous 1960s. I wanted my kids to know, for certain, where their dad stood. So I got a lot more open about my political beliefs. It had probably been kidding myself to think I could stay out of it in the first place.

Thus, in 2020, when we were mostly all locked inside and everyone on every corner of every political spectrum was going a little bit more bonkers and stir crazy, I put up my first lawn sign. I actually put up several. I probably put up too many.

I took two of those signs down the day Biden won, and the other two down the morning of January 6, those brief hours when that was a pretty good day. I briefly put up a Warnock sign in the weeks leading up to his 2022 Senate race against Herschel Walker, a race that ended with Warnock’s stirring victory and almost everyone I know, regardless of political persuasion, being relieved they got to go back to just loving Herschel Walker the Georgia football legend again. And I hadn’t put up another once since.

Because our street is so busy, though, I knew it would be a matter of time until they started popping up this year. The political scientist David Shor has written that he believes you can get early political indicators from lawn signs, specifically in neighborhoods like mine, ones that may lean in one political direction but are hardly homogenous. During the Republican primary last winter and this spring, I saw many signs for local Republican candidates but almost none for Trump; I saw more HALEY signs than I did TRUMP signs. Once the general election matchup between Biden and Trump was set, I saw almost no lawn signs at all, no BIDENs, no TRUMPs anywhere. There almost seemed to be a quiet detente in our neighborhood, as if everyone was so discouraged by their options that they almost didn’t want to admit the election was happening at all.

When Biden had his debate disaster in July, though, and Harris took over for him, you knew the ice was about to thaw. The question was who would crack first. Because Harris took over so late in the process, there weren’t official campaign signs available immediately—some people are still waiting on theirs—and there was a week of relative silence. But then the Etsy signs started going up, which got the one guy on the street who does put up a TRUMP sign to post his, and then they were everywhere. I held off, though. It was having too much fun watching people engage in real time.

And then, one morning … all the HARRIS WALZ signs were gone. Every single one of them in the neighborhood, on our street and many others, vanished. There were rumors and NextDoor suspects. (That sounds like an updated “You Call Me Al” lyric. All along, all along, there rumors and NextDoor suspects, there were hints and allegations.) Was it football fans coming in from south Georgia? A scary QAnon theorist? A fraternity initiation? (This was, and remains, my theory.) This led, as it inevitably had to, to an escalation, across the board. Suddenly, nearly every lawn had a political sign, almost out of a neighborhood solidarity, a collective punch back against what, after all, was someone coming on people’s land and stealing their property. Our street began to look like the floor of a convention.

I’ll confess to even contributing it to myself. I wanted to stand with my neighbors too, after all.

Now we are in the midst of a full-on lawn sign street battle. Everybody has upped their game, including the Trump sign guy on the corner, who has now actually put a sign of Trump’s “Fight Fight” fist pump after his shooting. Amusingly, he is facing it not sideways, so that traffic going both ways can see it, but instead directly at the house across from his so they have to look at it every time they walk out their front door. They have responded by putting up a two more signs and a huge HARRIS WALZ flag. Meanwhile, there’s a race for county attorney general happening here in Athens, and the Republican candidate in that race has signs on both lawns. I’ve met him, he seems like a good guy. I think I’m gonna vote for him.

You might see all this as divisive, and polarizing, and exactly the sort of thing that turns people off to politics in the first place. But I don’t see it that way. This is in fact politics working the way it’s supposed to, civic engagement, people voicing what they care about, who they support, what they stand for, in the most private, intimate place possible: Where they live. They are not hiding out from the world. They are not pretending that nothing matters. They are not cynical. I, obviously, do not agree with the political beliefs of the guy on our street with the Trump sign, and I’ll confess that seeing a picture of a bigot with blood on his face when you’re driving your kid to school every morning strikes me as a bit much. Particularly after that debate last week, I find it increasingly baffled, and even a little disturbed, by anyone who thinks that guy should be the leader of the free world. But I don’t want my neighbor to take his signs down, and I don’t want anyone to take mine either. It’s good that he’s a part of this, that he feels like he has a stake in all of this too, that he lives in this neighborhood just like I do and feels comfortable staking his claim to it. I see him out mowing his lawn, and he sees me taking my kids to soccer practice, and we wave to each other like we always have. I’m glad he sees someone outside his media bubble, and I’m glad I do too, because we are, after all, both just people. I would not want him to feel unwelcome on this street just like I would not want to feel unwelcome myself. Because when this election is over, and everybody takes their signs down, we are all going to have to still live next to one another. All of us. We all know where each other stands. And we’ll still be neighbors.

Just to be safe, though: I’ve got a whole bunch of backup HARRIS WALZ signs for whoever needs them. Which we all probably will.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Look, Aaron Rodgers Is Playing Football Again, New York. Yay.

2. I Contributed to a Debate About Aaron Judge vs. Shohei Ohtani, MLB.com. I think the answer is obvious, but you might differ.

3. James Earl Jones’ Essential Performances, Vulture. Grierson and I whipped this together for them, RIP, James Earl Jones.

4. Tim Burton Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

5. Which Struggling-in-the-Second-Half Team Should We Be Most Worried About? MLB.com. I went with the Guardians.

6. This Week’s Five Fascinations, MLB.com. The Orioles’ struggles, the Mets-Braves race, the plucky Tigers, Byron Buxton and Emmanuel Clase.

7. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. Just a couple of more weeks to go on these.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, finally back this weekend.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I think they’re gonna have to clean house.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we recap the Tennessee Tech game and preview the Kentucky game.

Morning Lineup, I did Friday morning’s show.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump,” Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic. My old pal Mark Leibovich, a former guest of The Will Leitch Show no less, absolutely knocked this Atlantic cover story out of the park, as usual.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! (I’m sorry I’m so behind on these. But I am starting to catch up!)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Burning,” The War on Drugs. New War on Drugs live album! My absolute favorite live band just put out “Live Drugs Again,” their second album, and while it’s not making up for the fact that they’re not coming down to Georgia for their current tour (though, to be fair, remember that you’re talking to the lone middle-aged white man who remains a skeptic of The National, the band they’re touring with), it will have to do.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Also … shhh, look what just popped up on the site that propels all of Jeff Bezos’s penis rockets.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will