No Sign Is A Bad Sign For Obama

I tweeted about this but the 140 character limit sometimes makes it difficult to express precisely what you mean. Anyway, this afternoon I was driving through the streets of Exeter to neighboring Stratham where I would ultimately perform grocery shopping. Yard signs are plentiful. A bountiful harvest this year.

I noticed a trend. There are a lot of Democratic yard signs, that is signs with their party's nominee on display. Conspicuosly absent from the arrangements is the presidential candidate. There are signs for The Dems' gubernatorial candidate, their congressional candidate, their state house candidates and their local candidates. I don't know if there is even one Obama yard sign anywhere in town.

I started counting yards that had Democratic signs but no Obama sign. I took a different route home from Market Basket so as to not count any yard twice. 31! Thirty one yards that contained at least one Dem sign but no Obama sign. I thought I had seen an Obama sign before I started my count but I am not certain about that.

Granted my survey was not even a little bit scientific. The Dem gubernatorial candidate lives in Exeter so one might expect to see quite a few Hassan signs standing by themselves. But 31-0? That is not coincidence.

I was not counting Romney yards but there were at least a dozen on the route I took. It was possibly two dozen. Exeter tends to be a Democratic town, largely dominated by Phillips Exeter Academy. But if yard signs could vote, Romney would win by a landslide and possibly pitch a shutout.

One has to suspect that the Dems' internal polling might show something a little different from CBS's prognosticators. Word is out: distance yourself from the pariah. Reading between the signs, one can surmise that the incumbent faces an uphill battle in the Granite State.