Last week I rode to McSherrystown to visit with my friend Craig Smith at FX Smith's Sons cigar factory. He wants to add Muniemakers and Toppers to his web site. It's about a two, two and a half hour ride. The direct route transects the prettiest murdersickle riding MerryLand and Pennsyltucky have to offer. Rolling fertile hills; lumpy one lane roads thru woods; little battered mill towns where the mill closed when the jobs moved to Mexico, where the worn denizens have nothing left to do but sit smoking on the stoop watching you ride by; then back to the wilderness, rushing cricks, dodging whistlepigs, ducking beneath one lane underpasses, bumping over rusty train tracks. I like that ride.
Well, earlier that morning, Bearswatter and I were driving back from the IHOP, when we remarked how many Trump/Pence signs littered the landscape, but how you never see a Hillary sign. Never. Why? Now, Newark is a populous university town. En route to the Merryland border, I passed right thru the University, passed frat houses, then thru upscale neighborhoods where professors live on the left with their country club on the right. Trump/Pence, both sides.
Nothing else to do for two hours, I started counting signs. Lost count somewhere around eighty, still in Merryland. I'm gonna estimate 200 Trump/Pence, time I got there.
Spotted one Gary Johnson sign in PA. That was a surprise.
First and only Hillary sign posted on the right as I entered Hanover, very last minute, bout two miles from McSherrystown.
Trump/Pence again all thru town to the factory.
Hillary Clinton tied with Gary Johnson!
Quarter mile from home there's a cigar store, where I stopped in to score some mild stuff to bomb a forum newb. There's a Trump/Pence headquarters set up in a storefront right next door. What the hell, I dropped in, asked the gal at the desk what's up with all these signs. She replied: "You have no idea. Most of our signs get destroyed. There's gangs that go round every night tearing them up. We get a lot of people tell us they are afraid to post a sign because of vandalism."
I ran round the whole of my own development. Three Trump/Pence. Zero Hillary.
We all know better than to trust polls. Like Rueters, here couple weeks back, who, soon as their polls showed Trump ahead. they tergiversated: "Oh no; there must be an error in our method," re-engineered their method, so that the results of the same poll two days later showed Hillary ahead. So where do we get a real handle on the question of the day?
Does a simple sign count count as any kind of a poll?
If so, those media megacorp syndicates already printing up their dewey eyed headlines may wake up Wednesday to a joyful Truman holding up the newspaper.
--- or true jackass, in this case.
Of course, you do have to keep an eye on demographics. Mine are not likely to be yours. My route led thru a lot of countryside. Hard handed hard working practical people live there. People who change their own transmission in their old pickup. People who shoot from deer stands, not drive bys. Who wear their hats brim forward and pull their pants up. There may be some youths among them stranded in their parents basement by failed Obamanomics who may have posted a different sign if only it were their house. But by the same token, these listless mill towns, every stoop holds an ex union member, and welfare is no stranger to their old clapboard house. And Newark, as I say, is a University town -- no basket of deplorables here. My development is a racially heterogeneous working man's neighborhood. Cable installers, plumbers, carpenters, fellows with business decals on their pickup doors, mothers and children.
Then there's the whole voter fraud demographic. Signs don't count the millions of dead voters, aliens, felons, unregistered, thrice coounted, fictional, bought, blocs, and engineered miscounts ... ask Bernie. There's a very good and consistent reason why one side opposes voter IDs. Not because one specific race is too hapless, dumb, and pathetic to secure enough ID to buy a beer. But because, face it, it's a well-organized and professional plunderbund. Trump will have to win by a landslide to eke out a victory.
Try it yourself. I'd be curious to know how other precincts report in. Tell us about how and where you counted what.
Makes me wonder...
