‘It’s almost like sign warfare’: In a heated presidential race, political lawn signs are a flash point in Philadelphia’s collar counties

The woods behind Montgomery Presbyterian Church in Lansdale looked like a graveyard for fallen Kamala Harris signs. About 250 were lying among the dirt and overgrown grass, said Mike Holsonback, the volunteer with the Worcester PA Democrats who discovered them in mid-October.

About 150 signs were salvaged and returned to local Democratic committees. The rest were stuffed in three trash bags, Holsonback said, torn beyond repair.

“I was disgusted,” said Holsonback, 49. “It’s one thing to steal or vandalize somebody’s signs. It’s another to just throw them in the woods.”

Political lawn signs have become a flash point in the Philadelphia suburbs, with both Republican and Democratic organizers reporting upticks in theft and vandalism even as some communities in other swing states move away from signs altogether to avoid disputes.

Signage makes up a minuscule part of the hundreds of millions of dollars Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have poured into winning Philly’s coveted collar counties and Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes. And yet the signs are hyper-visible and intensely polarizing, with each theft or instance of vandalism eroding community trust.

Jokesters messing with signs is common every election cycle, organizers said, but this year’s mischief has an undercurrent of animosity. Some residents of Montgomery and Bucks Counties have filed police reports about threats and repeat visits from trespassers over their Harris and Trump signs.

Displaying political signs on private property — such as on front lawns — is protected by the First Amendment. Stealing those signs is considered misdemeanor theft under Pennsylvania law, which can result in fines of up to $2,000.

» READ MORE: Are Philly’s suburbs the key to the White House? Why Trump and Harris are renewing their focus on the collar counties.

“It’s almost like sign warfare out here,” said Bob Mason, 70, a Democratic committeeperson in Levittown who filed a report with Bristol Township police on Oct. 1 after signs placed at Five Points and across from Truman High School were stolen.

Mason has lived in the Bucks County community since 1982. Watching the signs get tampered with, he said, has made him “less trusting.”

Nicholas McGoldrick, 33, has lived in Levittown his entire life. After putting up signs for Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, hanging a pink Harris flag from his fence felt like a no-brainer.

That’s when the trouble came.

McGoldrick bought a $250 surveillance camera after someone took credit on Facebook for coming onto his property with a pocket knife to cut down the flag in late August. After he replaced it with a large sign backing Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, two adolescent boys tipped over the sign and tore another flag, according to video footage reviewed by The Inquirer.

A police report was filed on Sept. 24, Middletown Township police confirmed, a tactic McGoldrick pursued after being threatened and doxxed in local Facebook groups while posting about the incidents.

“These people are so thin-skinned. They can’t stand the sight of someone disagreeing with them. They think it’s personal, and react in a really strong way,” McGoldrick said.

Registered Republican Denise DePaul had a similar experience, filing a report with Whitpain police on Oct. 15 after a man slashed and dismantled the 4-by-4-foot sign supporting Trump and running mate JD Vance sign on her front lawn. The investigation is ongoing, police said, but the incident left DePaul shaken.

“I thought everyone who had a Harris sign was a suspect at first,” said DePaul, 52.

» READ MORE: Local Republicans faced harassment after publicly supporting Kamala Harris. Is that ‘just how it’s going to be’?

Christian Nascimento, who chairs the Montco GOP, said the committee has seen an uptick in vandalism this year, including at its satellite office in Lower Providence, where someone spray-painted “Hell No” in red block letters over its Trump sign.

“I don’t understand it,” said Nascimento. “If you don’t like what you see, you don’t go and vandalize someone’s personal property. You put up your signs. You knock doors. You work harder.”

Residents and party officials cited political polarization as a cause of the collar counties’ sign battles.

Republican and Democrats experience similar rates of “severe political hostility,” such as threats and harassment, according to recent research from Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative. Those rates have increased alongside the rapid polarization of the American electorate, with a much-cited Pew Research Center study from 2020 finding that 80% of Americans say that they have few or no friends across the political aisle.

» READ MORE: The ousted Montco Republican swatted after supporting Kamala Harris appears in campaign’s new ads airing in swing states

In August, a Montgomery County GOP official was swatted for encouraging Republicans to vote against Trump, while a couple in Malvern faced false accusations of pedophilia for appearing in a Harris ad in September.

“It’s kind of like a race to the bottom. Who can do the worst things the fastest?” said Kevin Crawford, 40, of Bucks County’s Plumstead Township. He and his wife, Maureen, witnessed someone jump out of a car to kick down the Harris-Walz sign in their backyard on Oct. 8. Since then, the couple have been taking down the sign before bed each night and rehanging it in the morning.

“I think it’s really sad that as a community, we’ve come to this place where we’ve lost just basic respect for one another,” said Maureen Crawford.

Over in Upper Providence Township, Montgomery County, the sign theft became so rampant that the local Democratic committee started outfitting Harris signs with AirTag tracking devices to trace disappearances.

About 50 signs went missing before committee members made the change in mid-October, said Ben Stevens, chair of the Upper Providence Democrats. Since then, they’ve discovered that the state Department of Transportation had taken some signs, while others had been pulled off the street by confused residents.

A few had been genuinely stolen. Earlier this month, Stevens tailed a truck outfitted with Trump stickers to a local supermarket after the AirTag reported that a sign he had just placed at Egypt and Black Rock Roads in Oaks was missing. After calling the police and deputizing another volunteer to confront the purported thief, Stevens got the sign back. It was a relatively civil exchange, he said.

The AirTag experiment “makes me feel a little bit more in control,” Stevens said. “We can actually get a sense of what’s happening and do something productive about it.”

» READ MORE: ‘City folks’ who moved to Philly’s fast-growing suburbs could help Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump in Pa.

Despite the kerfuffles, research shows campaign signage can have a negligible effect on elections, increasing voter share by 1.7% on average, according to a 2015 study by Columbia University professor Donald Green. That matters more in tight down-ballot races, where name recognition can be the difference between winning or losing.

For presidential elections, lawn signs have more to do with a sense of expression and building a facade of collective power than swaying results.

In Levittown, McGoldrick put up his to reassure Harris supporters amid what he said can feel like a sea of Trump signs.

Supporters of both parties reinstalled their signs after being targeted. DePaul said she put up hers to set a good example for her three daughters.

“I want them to be strong women, and if they feel passionately about something, they should feel free in America to use all the rights they were given to express it,” she said.

As for McGoldrick, it’s about fighting back.

“I’m not backing down,” McGoldrick said. “I’m not letting these fake patriots bully me out of anything.”