Where are the 2016 presidential bumper stickers?

Newsflash: This is a strange presidential election.

If you need proof — which surely you don’t — but if you did need proof, you could just look at the bumper stickers supporting this year’s candidates.

That’s right, there are none. Or at least, not many.

Sure, there are those tiny square “I’m with Her” window stickers.

At least, I saw one of them this week on a car in the parking lot of the Publix off Bradley Park Drive.

And there are those old-fashioned bumper stickers emblazoned with “Make America Great Again.”

At least, I saw one of them a couple of weeks ago on J.R. Allen Parkway.

Not sure if others exist. Not sure if they were mass-produced or created on someone’s home computer.

But note that each sticker is missing one key element: The name of the candidate.

You know, because putting a sticker on your car that contains a candidate’s name might remove all doubt about for whom you’re voting.

Have you ever seen more people reluctant to admit their allegiance than in this election?

In 2016, people are more willing to say for whom they’re not voting.

If somebody says they’re not voting for Hillary, you might assume that person is pulling the lever for Trump.

If somebody says they’re not voting for Donald, you might assume that person is casting a ballot for Clinton.

But who knows? There are three other candidates: Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and Nobody.

Except most people are quick to mention if they’re voting for one of those three, if only to say they’re not voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump.

But back to bumper stickers.

I first noticed their curious absence a couple of weeks ago when I drove to Athens for the football game between Georgia and Tennessee.

We can only hope that the last 10 seconds of this presidential election are as exciting as the ending of that ballgame.

(And by the way, since my column last week about leaving that game with two minutes remaining, I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody stopped me and said, “I bet you’ll never leave another football game early.”)

(Actually, I’m going to today’s game against Vanderbilt, and as with any Vanderbilt game, there’s a good chance that one could be in the books early in the third quarter. So don’t bet against me leaving early.)

Yes, I think that part about hoping we have an exciting election was sarcasm.

But I think it will be unpredictable. It may come down to the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, whatever that might be in the political realm. Hanging chads, I suppose.

I base this on the fact that nobody will fess up to a candidate. How is America going to vote if we don’t even know how our neighbors are going to vote?

But anyway, while driving to the game through Atlanta and rural middle Georgia and then into downtown Athens, I saw nary a presidential bumper sticker.

I realized this when I saw exactly one person in the Tate Student Center wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. (This might surprise you, but he was a white man over the age of 65.)

Eight years earlier, during another presidential race, I visited Athens for a football game and was struck by the large number of “McCain-Palin” bumper stickers along the way, as well as quite a few “Obama-Biden” ones.

That was a spirited time for bumper stickers.

You may remember the ones that said, “W The President,” which spawned the rebellious “F The President,” which in the spirit of bipartisanship, later gave way to “O Sh--.”

That seems like a long time ago.

This story was originally published October 14, 2016 at 8:16 PM with the headline "Where are the 2016 presidential bumper stickers?."