Tactics for protecting political signs in suburban Pittsburgh

Stephanie Grimes puts on rubber gloves, dips her fingers into a Styrofoam bowl filled with Vaseline, glitter and fox urine pellets and starts smearing. It is her latest attempt to save a load of defaced election posters she has repeatedly rescued from hillsides in Harmar along Freeport Road near Halton Bridge.

One of Grimes’ fellow Democratic volunteers routinely uses the granules to repel pests in his yard. This season, Grimes and company are hoping the pungent odor will curb the urge to damage and steal signs, although they doubt the smell will penetrate the wind from the nearby sewer plant.

Stephanie Grimes greases campaign signs to prevent theft on October 27 in Harmar. Other people protected their grass signs in other ways, including attaching the signs to plywood and securing them with fishing line and metal posts. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

The approach is one of a handful of tactics being used across the country to stem a wave of yard sign fraud sweeping the political spectrum during a hotly contested election centered on the presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.

As Grimes’ friend sprays WD-40 to give the signs a final slippery coat, a Trump supporter drives up and asks what they’re doing. “Come on, who doesn’t love glitter?” she jokes with him.

Grimes’ sign cleaning has sometimes attracted the attention of passing Trump fans, including one who talked to her while rescuing an abandoned Trump sign from the weeds.

In Pennsylvania, stealing a political lawn sign is a third-degree misdemeanor and can result in a fine of up to $2,000. Violating a lawn sign can result in up to 90 days in jail or a $250 fine. At a time when people catch neighbors and passersby destroying their plastic displays of devotion on their Ring cameras, the public shame of having video evidence of your crime spread across social media is its own price to pay.

Grimes, a working mom from Oakmont, northeast of Pittsburgh, puts up more signs than she destroys her opponents. It was early October when a committee member called her, upset, after five Harris signs she had put up the day before were taken down for a second time. They returned and installed 72 signs near the bridge. “We knew if we put so many in, they wouldn’t be able to steal them all,” she said. People started calling and asking her about the signs, conveying the joy the display brought them. “Well, shoot,” Grimes said. “Now we need to keep it up!”

For a month, she received early morning messages from people passing by the torn down signs on their way to work. In the afternoon she will return with new signs and walk across the grass in her coat. “Find a life,” she muttered to herself, throwing the rolled up signs into the pile. “They would probably tell me the same thing.” But the line of blue signs collected words of support from people.

Left: Stephanie Grimes displays torn down signs on Freeport Road Oct. 21 in Harmar. Right: same location with signs, October 27. “That’s why I keep coming here. … Because it matters to people,” Grimes said. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

It’s common to see bald eagles on the side of the road, but when Grimes removed the signs from the cliff leading to the railroad tracks below, it became a sight to behold.

With 10 days before the election, Grimes swings his tail as he straightens the twisted signs and sticks them back into the ground. At a three-way intersection, passing motorists shout pro-Trump profanities. “White dudes in a pickup truck?” she asks. She made no mistakes four times in a row. “With the First Amendment! Remember this guys? – she shouts back. As the traffic light changes, an elderly woman drives by and honks her horn, giving Grimes a thumbs up, while a line of little girls in the back seat crane their necks to watch.

From a nearby gravel parking lot, Bob Hamilton points the phone at Grimes from the window of his SUV, an unexpected stop on his trip to grab windshield wiper blades and wash the car. Grimes tucks the remaining signs under his arm and approaches her. “Can I help you?”

Hamilton tells her about heated arguments between neighbors over pro-Trump yard signs in Mount Lebanon. “I’ve been through a lot of elections and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hamilton says. “I can say it has a lot to do with it,” he says, waving his iPhone in the air. “People do and see things online, and they think that because we’re not interacting face-to-face, they can say and do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.”

Hamilton stayed out of politics until the 2022 local primary. He says in his Fox Chapel community, people generally avoid political signs, but he plans to put some up a couple of days before the election. “We just got 25,000 from (Elon) Musk,” he says, referring to his local Republican network.

Hamilton isn’t the first person to stop by to record Grimes.

On October 18, a man who wanted to be identified as a Vietnam veteran approached her and turned on his phone camera. He told her he was willing to buy signs at the Monroeville GOP Victory Center to counter her sea of ​​plastic blue. While other volunteers silently set up signs around her, Grimes—the wife of a veteran—walked back and forth with a man, explaining the Oakmont Democratic Party’s approach to political activism. While they were talking, he fished a Trump sign from nearby bushes and placed it along the sidewalk.

Grimes slammed a suitcase full of irreparable marks as he contemplated the interaction. “Someone asked me why I hired him, and I said, I need him to know that we are human,” she said. “Like, try to find something we might be interested in and then we can argue about it,” she added with a laugh.

Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist for PublicSource and can be reached at [email protected], on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg or on Twitter @stephstrasburg.

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