When I lived in North Carolina my experience was different than yours. Leading up to the election, the majority of cars had Bush or those "W" stickers. Sure there were lots of Kerry too but they were outnumbered. Then after the election there were a bunch of "W: Still the President" stickers on the Hummers.

If someone could explain this bumper sticker to me, I would appreciate it. A car at the grocery store had 2 stickers. One said "Couples for Christ." The other looked like a failed Venn diagram. Two circles intersect, but nothing is in the intersection. In one circle is a 4-person nuclear family (in silhouette). In the other circle is a woman holding a purse. What does this mean? Should the family adopt the woman? Are women living alone enemies of the family? I would appreciate a translation. By the way, bumper stickers that have to be translated aren't very effective.

FF, Yes, I saw cars with Bush stickers here, too. But the "cars with lots of bumper stickers" are almost always liberal-themed. Is that not true in NC?

I think that if we were counting numbers of cars with bumper stickers, then, overall, in all of my driving (in urban and rural Wisconsin and Illinois, mostly), I see more "right-wing" bumper stickers (counting "W," "Bush," etc. as right-wing). But I agree with Gordon that the cars with the kinda-scary number of bumper stickers are almost always "left-wing." Perhaps it's because having a lot of bumper stickers is out of the ordinary, marking you as sort of odd. The stereotype that people on the left are less concerned with convention and appearing normal probably has something to it. So if you have two people with roughly equivalent desires to express their political opinions, one on the left, one on the right, the one on the left is more likely to plaster the opinion on her car than is the one on the right. Just a theory.

I have no idea how to interpret Christine's bizarre bumper sticker, except that it seems vaguely to suggest that women with purses (money?) are separate from families.

This weekend driving to Stevens Point I saw a bumper sticker that I found so offensive I won't even write about it here.

I would say that's not true in Illinois either. Chicago probably has more liberal-themed bumper stickers (as you would expect) but as you move further south I'd say your conservative themes (mainly anti-abortion/go read your bible stuff) become more predominant.

You don't see many stickers in the suburbs. I think people care more about their cars there.

And obviously this is all anecdotal, but I disagree with Jessica; I've seen quite a few cars absolutely laden with anti-abortion, pro-Bush, read your Bible, Jesus died for you, no same sex marriage, etc. stickers. Both the left wing and right wing have plenty of people who aren't concerned about being conventional.

Yep, a good number of the cars with lots of political stickers were liberal-themed in NC. But there seemed to be at least as many cars plastered with multiple anti-abortion messages or religious stickers, especially the "marriage = one man + one woman" stickers. So it seemed like overall I'd pull up behind socially or politically conservative cars more often than not, despite the ocassional car coated with liberal stickers.

Here in Dayton, OH you see a good mix of bumper stickers. On my way home from work, I usually see the same two cars that are both plastered with stickers. One of them is of the "Fetuses don't have a choice" variety and the other is of the "Get your religion out of my uterus" variety. I'm just waiting for them to ram into each other.

Prior to the 04 election, a friend gave me one of the W2004 stickers. As a show of support, I put in on my car. About a week later I came out to the school parking lot and there was a cup of coffee that was thrown all over my vehicle. I decided that it was rather unwise of me to make my vehicle a target for the 50% of the who disagreed with me. I'm sure many Kerry supporters came to the same unfortunate conclusion.

Thanks for the observations everyone. Ok, based on this extensive sample, I will set aside the liberals-love-bumber-stickers-more-than-conservatives hypothesis. Based on several reports of high sticker volume reflecting the majority view, we might ask whether a certain number of people of all ideological stripes like having lots of bumber stickers on their cars. Or whether being in the majority emboldens people to sticker their car (perhaps a car is less likely to be vandalized if its stickers reflect the majority view). Or perhaps there is a simple economic explanation, like the one offered by Larry: the number of stickers is correlated to how much people care about their cars.

... not only are there conservative cars, but there are schizophrenic cars too. My brother, a staunch Republican, sort of had joint custody of an old Mitsubishi Mirage for a few years. Our compromise was that I refused to take off my "Tsongas for President" sticker (four years after Tsongas had lost the 1992 Democratic primary to Clinton), but he could put his "Dole for President" sticker on the car.

My neighbors in Cambridge, Mass. -- old Tsongas fans from his stint as a liberal senator in the 70s and 80s -- couldn't figure out who on earth was for Tsongas in '92 but Dole in '96. Gordon, seeing that car on the highway in front of his, surely would've kept a wide berth from this presumably politically unstable individual; who kows when he'd abruptly shift his car to the left or the right?