Will Leitch, writing at his Medium account, outlines his version of civic engagement.

There is something charming, even endearing, to me about a political lawn sign. In an age where everyone seems to be shouting for your attention all the time, a political lawn sign just sits there, lo-fi and eternal, like a scrawl on a cave. I know there are people — you may well be one of these people — who are irritated by political lawn signs, who are already overwhelmed and exhausted by politics and the coming election, who have taken great pains to avoid it and thus who don’t appreciate having to be confronted by it constantly when they’re just trying to drive home from work. I am empathetic to this. Remember, I live in a swing state, which means I currently can’t watch a 20-second Illini football highlight without having to hear about the apparently infinite number of serial killers Kamala Harris has let out of prison or how J.D. Vance is hiding a tattoo of the complete Project 2025 platform under his beard. It’s relentless. I get wanting to have a few minutes away.

But the difference between firing off angry missives on social media and putting up a sign on your front lawn encouraging people to vote for your candidate of choice strikes me as vast. To stake your claim in front of your home, where you live, isn’t tossing more verbiage onto the endless heap like posting on social media is; it’s actively participating in the public square. It is putting your money where your mouth is, or, more accurately, it’s understanding that the political is personal — that you and the people who live in your community are together. Perhaps the candidate whose sign is on my lawn will win, or perhaps the candidate whose sign is on your lawn will. But whatever happens will affect both of us, as humans, as citizens, as neighbors. We have grown to isolate ourselves so much, to stay in our silos, to engage only with those who agree with us, to talk only to people who tell us what we want to hear. To put a sign in front of your house — the place where you sleep, and eat, and do laundry, and all those mundane essentials that accumulate to make up a life — that says “this is what we stand for, we would hope you will consider standing for it too” isn’t cynical propagandizing, or civic pollution. It’s an attempt to reach out. It’s an aim to connect.

I have never had a lawn sign in my yard. This year, I bought a Harris-Walz sign for my front yard. As of this writing, it has not arrived yet, but it was because of Will’s writing that I felt the need to support the campaign publicly.