in 1990 I ran in the primary as a Democratic candidate from the left against a DINO. Mainly because he was voting for funding for The School of the America's in Ft. Benning, the school that trained the assassins that killed the 6 Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989.
Because I didn't have very good name familiarity (first race ever) I place red and white political yard signs all over the city on people's lawns and windows (none on public property) because the US Congressman involved didn't like seeing all those signs and because I placed them there before the city said I could (most cities have a sign time limitation) I got my name out way better and much cheaper than I could have any other way. The Congressman harangued the city to get the signs down til the time when the code said you could put them up and went to people's property and took the signs and knocked on the doors and said get them out of the windows.
We took this to court and won at the city level, lost at the state court of appeals and then the WA Supreme Court kicked to the US Supreme Court and they handed it back to the State Supreme Court to hear. We won 9-0 basically because there are no limitations on real estate and commercial signs (and there will never be unless that official wants his campaign contributions to dry up) and because political speech has to be protected before commercial speech the court had actually no choice but to rule the law of time unconstitutional. It is now one of the test cases in electoral sign law. There were some other components of this also, but this was the main part.
I was in South Bend one day working (I work for a religious agency that sends me to speak and sing at churches and religious colleges)and the person who was to be my guide asked me if I was the Mike Collier from Tacoma in the yard sign case, blew me away., It turned out that she taught electoral law at Notre Dame and she asked me to speak to her class. Blew me away. Any that's it in a nutshell.
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