Sign sign everywhere a sign
By 
I’ve been thinking about political yard signs, specifically presidential ones.
What are the functions of such signs?
It seems likely that the pragmatic political value of such signs is inversely correlated to the prominence of the race they reference. So a sign saying Smith For County Commissioner may remind people to vote in an off-year election, that Smith is the Democratic candidate, and so forth.
A Harris/Walz sign obviously doesn’t perform these functions. So why do people put them up? (This isn’t a rhetorical question; I’m genuinely wondering about this).
Some possibilities:
(1) Advocating that people vote for the candidate. This is the most straightforward explanation. I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone changes their vote because of a proliferation of yard signs in their neighborhood or town, but I can imagine that a few fence sitters might be nudged toward voting by the constant reminders that the election is happening. On the other hand fence sitters could just be annoyed. Which brings us to . . .
(2) Signaling to your neighbors what your political commitments are. On this account, a presidential candidate sign is similar to one of those “In This House We Believe” lists. (Again, an annoyance factor may produce perverse effects).
(3) Feeling like you’re contributing in some way to the campaign effort. This is a bit question begging, since by itself this doesn’t explain how you’re contributing, unless you buy into the positive effects of (1) to a significant extent.
Other reasons?
Relatedly, I’ve noticed that the ratio of yard signs in any town tends to be wildly disproportionate to the voting outcomes in those places. Specifically, a 3 to 1 Democrat to Republican voting ratio will ;produce, roughly speaking, a 50 to 1 Harris to Trump sign ratio, and vice versa. The reasons for this. are not hard to imagine, but I find it very striking. I also assume this extreme disjunction has gotten a lot more extreme with political polarization. If you’re a Trumper in a Harris neighborhood, you probably don’t want people to hate you (although oppositional defiance disorder is a very big thing in MAGAland), and if you’re a Harris voter in a Trump neighborhood you would probably prefer to avoid death threats, your house burning down etc.
One thing I don’t have a sense of is what signage practices are currently like in truly mixed neighborhoods. My guess is that you now get a lot less signs in such neighborhoods than formerly, which is related to the fact that such neighborhoods are not nearly as common as they were 20 or 30 years ago.