Mom's Basement Media

See ya on the 5th!

I swore off the internet today until after the election. If I see or hear the words Sarah Palin one more time, I WILL CUT OFF MY HAND!!

Peace, Love & Victory,
Stumpy C.

The Great Texas Bumper Sticker Poll

Sure, Austin is a hotbed of commie liberalism, but a few weeks ago, I began to think I was seeing a lot of Obama bumper stickers on cars, and wondering why I hadn’t seen a single McCain sticker. My first thought was that I was a victim of “confirmation bias,” whereby a person sees things that are agreeable with his worldview, and doesn’t absorb information that isn’t. (or, more dryly, according to Wikipedia, which is always right about everything: “confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.”)

Anyway. I decided to count. Sure, Austin is liberal, but this is still Texas, and there’s still plenty of Republicans around, right? I’m sure there are, but they’re not showing it on the backs of their cars these days.

I started carefully wathcing for political bumper stickers everywhere I went in and around Austin. I kept a quick tally of the following 4 categories:
1. Obama stickers
2. McCain stickers
3. Ron Paul stickers
(sure Paul is a has-been, but he’s also a home-boy, so he gets lotsa love around here, still)
4. Ron Paul stickers also accompanied by infowars.com stickers
(infowars.com stickers tend to appear exclusively on older single-occupant pickup trucks driven by middle-aged white males.)

Starting August 18th, I carefully recorded every single campaign sticker I saw on any car — I went out of my way and trolled several parking lots, as well as regular driving in traffic — on a little notepad in my car, and stopped on September 10th, because I was just tired of doing it. I took 2 “road trips” during this time span.

The results:

In and around Austin:
1. Obama 50
2. McCain 1
3. Ron Paul 6
4. Ron Paul plus infowars.com 1

Notes about Austin — It was a full week before I spotted the McCain sticker, on 8-23. On about 9-3, I got excited thinking I’d seen another one, but upon closer inspection, determined it said “McSame.” I didn’t attribute it to Obama, having no idea who had produced it. Also, I probably undercounted Obama stickers by at least ten, because I didn’t know until after I got done counting that the black “Got Hope?” stickers were Obama-specific, so I didn’t count at least five of them, and there’s a generic “Texas Democrat” sticker that looks an awful lot like the “Texans for Obama” sticker, so I didn’t count those unless I could very clearly read them. I was sorely disappointed by category 4, as I sincerely thought I’d seen quite a few RP/IW combos prior to my poll. This is the one place where I did suffer confirmation bias. On the one drive I took from central Austin out into the suburbs, I didn’t see any more republican-based stickers, only a dwindling of Obama stickers. Also, I did not count the 4 Obama stickers we have on our vehicles here at my house, as just going around slapping stickers on cars, then counting them doesn’t sound like clean statistics to me.

Road Trip 1: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Flew into Philly on a Wed. afternoon, then drove around the west side of Philly, into the suburbs to the northwest, then back to the airport the next day.

The Results:
Obama 4
McCain 1

Road Trip 2: 4-hour drive into the Texas hinterlands, west of Rocksprings, on US 290, then on the smaller 2-lane Texas 41. A beautiful hill-country drive, almost entirely unmarred by the notion of presidential politics.

The results:
Obama 1
McCain 1
Paul 1

I think I saw all three of these in Fredericksburg, which is entirely overrun by tourists on weekends.

Total totals:
Obama 55
McCain 3
Paul 7

What does all this mean?

The massive lead in Obama stickers might be a factor of the contentious Democratic primary, and people have left theirs on since then. If that’s the case though, where are the Hillary stickers? I saw only one. The utter absence of a Republican primary presence may also be contributing to the utter absence of McCain stickers. The other factor more than likely is the makeup of the contributors (people motivated enough to give money to get a sticker), with Obama having a larger number of individual contributors, giving a smaller amount of money each, and McCain having a smaller number of contributors, giving larger amounts individually. However, I do think it says something about the general state of enthusiasm, or lack of it, on each side in this campaign. (these musings, are all pre-Sarah Palin — I’m just publishing this now, because I’m a complete slacker. I’ve seen fully 2 more McCain stickers since she took the veep nod.)

A final thought:

In general, the number of cars with political bumperstickers appears to statistically insignificant. I find myself kind of surprised to note that theres probably 300 cars on the road with no bumperstickers of any sort for each vehicle that has one, and then, the largest number of stickers one sees are not directly related to the ‘08 election. Parents are disproportionally proud of their soccer players in the world of bumper stickers, and even people with overtly political messages (anti-abortion, pro-choice, environmentalism, anti-war, we support our troops, etc. there is at least 10 cars in this group without an ‘08 candidate sticker.

Another final final thought:

Where are the McCain yard signs? Haven’t seen any of those either. The vast majority of Obama yard signs note the March 4th primary, but they’re holding up well, and the number does seem to be slowly growing.

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