Our home mailbox has been filled for weeks with mailers for candidates at the national, state, and local level. What have I learned from all of these mailers? Very little.

However, the one use they may have is for candidates’ names to catch my attention. I consider myself a fairly informed voter yet I cannot keep up with all of the local races. In a state with so many taxing bodies, there are numerous races for the Forest Preserve, County Board, municipal positions, and more. Who has the time to look at all of the positions of those candidates? I will enter the voting booth today with limited knowledge about dozens of names for positions that the average suburbanite has little knowledge about.

Thus, a mailer might catch my eye with a name in a way that another medium might not. All those texts from candidates in recent weeks? Most were automatically marked as spam by my phone and the others I did not look at. Political ads on television or radio? Easy to avoid by switching stations or using streaming services. News broadcasts about candidates? Can click past or avoid reading.

At the least, I took each of those mailers out of the mailbox, looked at them quickly, and then recycled them. Could they have planted a name or idea in my head? Perhaps.