Examining whether or not stealing/removing the signs of political opponents helps or hurts the thief's cause.
I occasionally see news clips or YouTube videos of people stealing or attempting to steal political signs. Heck, it even happened in a neighborhood near mine. A common comment about these antics is that it doesn't actually help the thief's cause, but hurts it: the sign owner will be angry their sign is stolen and purchase a new one, donating to the campaign the thief dislikes.
This essay will examine benefits from both perspectives: how impactful is the money the sign brings in and how impactful is the advertising the sign brings in? If the advertising is more impactful than the money, stealing political signs helps the thief's cause. If the money is more impactful than the advertising, the thief should leave the sign alone.
This is not an endorsement of sign-stealing nor encouraging signs to be stolen. Instead, I encourage the reader to get involved in the issues that matter to them rather than resort to childish tactics like sign-stealing.
First, how much are typical signs? Trump sells a set of 2 for $20, while Biden sells a single sign for $25. Assuming both of Trump's signs get stolen during one theft, they can be viewed as a single sign. The average then comes to $22.50, and rounding up returns $25/sign.
So how much benefit does $25 do? The answer is likely zero. Trump's 2016 campaign raised $433 MM, while Clinton's campaign raised $770 MM. $25 is a mere 0.000005774% and 0.000003247% of both funds.
FiveThirtyEight has an article showing the relationship between money and elections: How Money Affects Elections.
On the other hand, how much does advertising and name recognition of candidates really contribute? Literature can give an idea.
In their paper The Effects of Lawn Signs on Vote Outcomes: Results from Four Randomized Field Experiments, Green et al. examined the effects of signs on "a congressional candidate, a mayoral candidate, an independent expenditure campaign directed against a gubernatorial candidate, and a candidate for county commissioner" for a total of four experiments, respectively. Results are as follows:
Experiment 1:
Without covariates, the estimated effect of direct treatment on vote share is 2.5 percentage points (robust SE = 2.7)... The estimates sharpen considerably when the regression model is augmented with past vote outcomes as covariates. The estimated effect of direct treatment remains 2.5 percentage points, but the standard error falls sharply (robust SE = 1.7)... The results suggest that the signs exerted a direct treatment effect, although the effect falls short of conventional levels of statistical signi ficance.
Experiment 2:
Without adjustment, the signs appeared to increase vote share for Sheehan [the candidate] by 0.9 percentage points, but with adjustment, appeared to decrease her vote share by 1.4 points. Ironically, controlling for covariates increases our estimated standard errors. In either model, the standard errors are so large that we come away without a clear sense of the average treatment effects.
Experiment 3:
The inclusion of covariates reduces the estimated standard errors substantially, so we focus on those estimates. Cuccinelli's [the candidate] vote share increased by 1.8 percentage points in treated precincts... A randomization inference test of the joint null hypothesis that neither direct nor adjacent signs affected outcomes generates a p-value of 0.02.
Experiment 4:
focusing on the covariate-adjusted estimates in Table 6, directly treated precincts saw 1.2 percentage points lower vote share for Eichelberger and Schin... The standard errors associated with both estimates are quite large because covariates again fail to predict outcomes in this primary election.
Combined results:
...the pooled estimate of average effect of lawn signs in directly treated precincts is 1.7 percentage points, with a standard error of 0.7 percentage points.
Effects on voter turnout:
We find that lawn signs had essentially no effect on turnout. Pooling the covariate-adjusted estimates according to Equation 3 below, we fou nd that direct effect of lawn signs on total votes cast in a precinct was 7.2 votes, with a standard error of 9.5 votes.
Conclusion:
...it appears that signs typically have a modest effect on advertising candidates' vote shares—an effect that is probably greater than zero but unlikely to be large enough to alter the outcome of a contest that would otherwise be decided by more than a few percentage points.
According to Bump's Washington Post article, Sorry campaign managers: Lawn signs are only 98.3 percent useless.:
Of 6,000-plus general and primary elections in House and Senate races between 2006 and 2012, only 2.2 percent of races were within 1.7 percentage points, according to our analysis of initial results. In other words, this could matter in 1-in-50 races.
Examining past presidential elections and the percent differences, only three elections were decided by less than 1.7 percentage points: Hayes, 1876; Bush, 2000; Adams, 1796. In other words, this matters 3-in-58 or 1-in-19 elections.
It's important to note that none of these experiments were carried out on a presidential level, which is much more publicized and the candidates more well-known than typical gubernatorial or congressional elections.
It appears that stealing political signs of opposing candidates is more helpful than not (when viewed from a donation perspective). This is not taking into account that the sign owner may retaliate by purchasing many more signs than were actually stolen, including one massive one, and post on a neighbor community website asking if anyone has seen this person (the thief). Yes, oddly specific. Results of theft may vary.
Once again: This article is not an endorsement of sign-stealing nor encouraging signs to be stolen. Instead, I encourage the reader to get involved in the issues that matter to them rather than resort to childish tactics like sign-stealing.