What Yard Signs Say About How My Alabama Neighborhood Might Vote

by ANNIE HALLMAN (age 9) and BEN HALLMAN (much older than that)

My name is Annie. I live in Huntsville, Alabama. One recent day my dad took me for a drive. He asked me to take pictures of all the political signs in our neighborhood.

The signs showed Doug Jones, a Democratic Senator up for re-election, has a huge lead: 71 to 7 over his opponent, a former football coach named Tommy Tuberville. Joe Biden, who is running to replace Donald Trump as president, also has an edge in the yard sign vote: 31 to 7.

Jesus, and the seminal (my dad’s word) hip hop group Wu Tang Clan also each captured one yard sign vote.

My dad, who is writing this piece with me, said he didn’t really believe the story the signs told. We live in a state where more people vote for Republicans than Democrats. Even in places where Democrats get more of the votes, they rarely win by as much as the signs suggest they could here.

We decided to try to figure out what was going on, and what might happen next week, when our neighbors cast ballots in the general election.

Sweet Home Monte Sano

Let’s start with some facts about our community. We live in a neighborhood on the top of a small mountain called Monte Sano. Here’s what it looks like:

We moved here from Brooklyn, New York two years ago. I like that its quiet. My dad likes that it is surrounded by woods. My mom doesn’t like the quiet, or the fog.

What do the yard signs indicate will happen?

Let’s focus first on the presidential race. To make things easy, we are going to assume that there are two registered voters in each house and that they are going to vote the same way. That gets us to 62 votes for Biden and 14 votes for Trump.

Our local precinct is pretty small. In 2016, there were 712 votes cast for the two major-party presidential candidates. Some new homes have been built and the interest in Tuesday’s election is extremely high. So we are going to add some votes to that total. Because it makes the long division work more easily, we will assume that 760 people will vote for president this time around.

If the signs accurately reflected voter preference that would yield a vote count of (10x each of the signs)… 620 votes for Biden and 140 for Trump. Biden would win 81% of the vote.

In the Senate race, it would be 710 votes for Jones and 70 for Tuberville. That’s 91% for Jones.

A Democratic blowout of historic proportions! Is it really going to happen? Well … almost certainly not.

A mountain divided

Annie’s dad taking over here. She declared that I had “tricked” her into practicing math and went to bed.

This is a mostly white middle class neighborhood in a conservative-leaning city in a heavily conservative state. By those measures, it should have voted Trump … and it did. But not by as much as the demographics would suggest. Trump won by all of 10 votes.

What will happen this time?

Polling suggests that Trump has lost support in neighborhoods that look like ours across the country. More recent election results indicate that the tide may have turned on Monte Sano, too.

In the 2017 special election, Doug Jones, a Democrat who made his name prosecuting the Birmingham church bombers, hammered Republican Roy Moore in the precinct by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But Moore was more toxic than a Superfund site. Let’s throw this result out.

In the 2018 midterms, the Democratic candidate for the House seat that includes Huntsville won the precinct big, but that victory also comes with an asterisk: he’s a precinct neighbor. He lives on Monte Sano.

A more predictive race might be the 2018 gubernatorial contest. Walt Maddox, the Democratic challenger, won the precinct with 53% of the vote: 409 to 355 for Kay Ivey, the Republican incumbent.

There isn’t much daylight between Ivey and Trump on policy, but she isn’t anyone’s idea of a firebrand. Let’s assume, and this is a total spitball guess, that Trump’s Trumpisms costs him three percentage points from the 2018 gubernatorial total. That would yield a solid victory for Biden, 56% Biden, 44% Trump. (Yes, this tally ignores third party candidates).

Even if this prediction is substantially off — by 5% or even 10%—it is still clear that Monte Sano yard signage SIGNIFICANTLY overstates the degree of Biden and (probably) Jones support among our neighbors. The same is certainly true, also, of the Senate race.

So now we have a new research question. Why? What do yard signs actually say, if anything, about voting patterns? Do they mean anything at all?

If you have answers, send ’em our way.

Thanks for reading!

Annie and Ben

Appendix: Monte Sano yard sign totals, per Annie’s count

Joe Biden (D), 31

Donald Trump (R) , 7

Doug Jones (D), 71

Tommy Tuberville (R), 7

Jesus (Independent), 1

Wu-Tang Clan (Cosmic), 1