WASHINGTON—The Republican National Committee changed its federal filing status from "political party" to "hazardous materials incident" on Monday. The change followed an internal audit of a taxpayer-funded advertisement that aired during NFL games. The audit found the spot had done what forty years of losing campaigns could not.
The 30-second ad was paid for by the U.S. government. It opened with The Ferret-Wearing-Shitgibbon declaring, "This is the final battle." He then promised to cast out "communists, Marxists, and fascists."
RNC auditors later described the message as "the most effective Democratic turnout operation since the Voting Rights Act."
"We spent $12.4 million of taxpayer money to remind swing voters that we are running a man who thinks the opposition is a supernatural army," said RNC communications director Bethany Corbin. "It tested worse than our plan to replace Social Security with arcade tickets."
Former Mitt Romney campaign chief Stuart Stevens left the party after the former president's rise. He said the party did not break suddenly. It just filed the paperwork.
"Running a party on grievance is like running a restaurant on anger," Stevens said. "You can fill the room once. Then everyone leaves and writes a one-star review about the ambience."
The audit found that viewers who saw the advertisement more than twice were 21 points less likely to identify as Republican. Some saw it during a Week 4 RedZone commercial break. Eleven percent of that group said they would rather be tackled by a defensive end than vote for the incumbent. The other 89 percent said they had already stopped watching.
The Government Accountability Office opened a preliminary review into whether the ad violated campaign finance law. It concluded no violation occurred because the spot did not ask anyone to vote. It asked them to submit.
The committee also requested a federal grant to study whether an aired commercial can be retroactively unaired. The application was denied on the grounds that time travel was outside the scope of the requesting agency.
The administration continues to call the spot "presidential communication." A former White House aide said the ad was inspired by the thought that strongmen always win elections. That thought has never been true in a country with functioning plumbing and access to streaming services.
The RNC has stopped publishing its monthly Party Health Index. The index measured electoral viability, donor confidence, and how many audiences walked out before the third sentence of the former president's remarks. It peaked at 2.
"We are not saying the party is broken," said Corbin. "We are saying the party has entered a period of unplanned structural reassessment with zero remaining load-bearing walls."
Stevens put it differently. "The only people who don't know this is a realignment are the ones waiting for the buffet," he said. "It's not the buffet."
