Campaign advertising received
In election years, I normally get a flyer or two from each of half a dozen candidates, and a couple more on local and state measures. Usually there'll be one campaign that sends me an excessive number of flyers. But I think this year may hold the record for largest total number of flyers I've received. All of these are glossy four-color flyers, usually printed on two sides; a few are multiple pages long. Most are unusual sizes; the City Council ones are mostly the sort that have a hole at the top to be hung from doorknobs. (I wonder if some local flyer company got in touch with all the candidates and told them everyone else was doing it this year and they'd be left behind if they didn't.)
Spent a fair bit of yesterday discussing ballot measures with various people. (Thanks again for hosting the discussion, TC!) I think I now have a reasonably good idea of how I'm going to vote on those, but I still need to do some research to make decisions on the local offices. (City council, various local boards, etc.)
Here are the flyers I've received, none of which are likely to sway my vote in any direction:
Mountain View City Council
- One doorknob flyer for Margaret Capriles.
- One doorknob flyer and two mailed flyers (one of them is two stapled/folded sheets of paper, making an 8-page flyer) for Chris Clark.
- One doorknob flyer and one mailed flyer for John Inks.
- One doorknob flyer for Mike Kasperzak.
- One mailed flyer for John McAlister.
County Board of Education
One flyer for Grace Mah.
El Camino Hospital District Board
- Two flyers each for Dennis Chu and Bill James.
- One combined flyer for John Zoglin, Wesley Alles, and No On M.
Measure A (Valley Medical Center)
Two large Yes On A flyers, one of them four pages long.
Measure B (water supply)
One large four-page Yes On B flyer.
Measure M (El Camino Hospital)
Six large No On M flyers, all from Citizens for Responsible Health Care. Sometimes I wonder just how much of El Camino Hospital's budget is spent on printing and mailing redundant flyers. I also wonder whether they've got automated flyer-generating software; it seems like a waste of somebody's time to create six slightly different flyers with basically the same information in various permutations.
(It's almost like they're doing A/B testing—except that they can't measure the effectiveness of the individual variations, and even if they could, sending six variations to each person would ruin the test. I guess it's more like “A and B” testing.)
CA State Senate
Four large flyers for Jerry Hill, who I've never heard of before. Oh, except I see that one of those is addressed to a neighbor and just got left in my mailbox by mistake.
Prop 30 and 32 (taxes)
Four large No On 30/Yes On 32 flyers, two of them four-page foldouts. I guess billionaires can afford to send redundant flyers.
Prop 33 (auto insurance)
One Yes On 33 flyer, titled “Support Our Heroes.” I guess that's a better slogan than “Support the billionaire owner of an insurance company.”
It occurred to me the other day that it would be nice if California would separate the proposition booklet into two sections: one for billionaires' pet projects, the other for everything else. This year, we've got, what, five or six ballot propositions funded primarily by individual billionaires or children of billionaires? Something like that.
Combos
Two non-glossy but full-color flyers from “Budget Watchdogs” urging me to vote No On 30, Yes On 33, No On 37, and Yes On 39.
US Congress
One flyer for Anna Eshoo. (Yay, Anna Eshoo! She's the only person on this list that I'm enthusiastic about.)