There’s a new super PAC on the scene, and it says it’s dropping seven-figure sums to re-elect President Donald Trump. But while the group has released a handful of ads targeting key swing states, the vast majority of the money it’s told federal election regulators it's spending remains largely unaccounted for.
The only ads that the super PAC Our American Century appears to have produced are a pair of videos uploaded to its YouTube page on Wednesday. One hits Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden over the Chinese government’s ostensible support for his candidacy. The other features audio of a 911 call in Fredericksburg, Virginia, from a woman who said she was trapped in her car by demonstrators at a Black Lives Matter protest in June. (Police verified the 911 call and said in June that they were still investigating the matter.)
“In a Biden/Harris America, ‘peaceful protesters’ attack stranded moms and traumatize children,” the ad declares.
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Both spots appear to have low production values and simply splice together publicly available video and audio clips with some overlaid text. Neither of the ads, nor any other content from the group, has been aired on television this cycle. Indeed, there’s no record in Federal Communications Commission filings of any broadcast or cable ad spending by Our American Century since 2018. The group’s only disclosed spending has been on digital advertising.
That makes the astronomical sums the group has reported spending of late particularly curious. In a pair of filings with the Federal Election Commission late last month, Our American Century said it was spending $1.4 million on advertising in support of Trump and in opposition to Biden.
That is about 10 times as much as the group has spent on behalf of federal political candidates in any prior election cycle. And the sources of funds for its recent ad blitz remain a mystery. The largest-ever contribution prior to last month was $50,000. In its most recent FEC filing, OAC reported ending the month of September with just $7,851.72 in the bank. That means someone put up an unprecedented amount of money to bankroll its new pro-Trump push. The sources of its new financial support won’t be known until its next FEC filing later this month.
Apparent discrepancies in OAC’s reporting to the FEC and its actual advertising footprint to date add an air of mystery to a political spender that came out of nowhere late last month. Contacts for the group did not respond to multiple requests for additional information on its political activity of late.
The only advertising spending by Our American Century that we could find came from Facebook’s political ad archive. According to that platform’s data, the group has spent about $33,000 on 14 versions of a single ad promoting an August column deriding BLM protests by former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik.
According to Facebook data, OAC’s ads have targeted women in five key swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. But that’s the extent of its advertising on the platform so far. The two ads uploaded to the group’s YouTube page on Wednesday have yet to show up in any of its Facebook ads. According to Google’s ad database, which includes paid advertising on YouTube, OAC hasn’t spent any money on either platform.
While there are digital platforms that don’t disclose ad spending to the degree that Facebook does, the lack of any public record of OAC advertising beyond those few ads on the platform leaves a huge discrepancy between the large amounts of money the group claims to be spending on Trump’s behalf and its actual documented political activity.
Its reports to the FEC disclosed that spending in two tranches. On Sept. 19, OAC told the commission that it spent $700,000 on digital ads supporting Trump and opposing Biden. Ten days later, it reported another $700,000 in digital ads, broken down in precisely the same way: $140,000 supporting Trump and $560,000 opposing Biden.
None of OAC’s reports to the FEC on those expenditures say where, precisely, its digital ads would run. It simply reported paying a company called Old Town Digital Agency LLC, which was formed in Delaware a day before OAC’s first reported payment to it. The lawyer listed for the firm in Delaware corporate records, South Carolina tax attorney Frank W. Cureton, did not respond to an inquiry about the group.
OAC is actually a rebranded version of a political group formed in 2012. Initially called Geaux PAC, the group has reported spending on a handful of federal political contests since then, including U.S. Senate races in Florida and Missouri and a Republican House primary in Kansas.
What little public information there is about the OAC indicates strong ties to a prominent Republican polling firm, the Trafalgar Group, one of the few to accurately forecast some of Trump’s key 2016 Electoral College wins (and to date one of the president’s favorite pollsters). That firm’s principal, Robert Cahaly, lists Geaux PAC among his list of prior clients. In 2018, OAC reported buying a spate of ads by way of a firm called Ace Tomato Public Relations, an apparent reference to the 1985 comedy Spies Like Us. Ace Tomato shares an address with Trafalgar, and a strategist at the polling firm signed ad-buying paperwork on behalf of Ace Tomato. Cahaly did not respond to inquiries about OAC.
That’s largely where the paper trail ends. Domain-registration information for OAC’s website shields the identity of its administrators. The group’s mailing address, as listed in FEC filings, is a Virginia post-office box affiliated with its compliance firm, and shared with dozens of other PACs that employ that firm. A phone number listed in Facebook advertising-disclosure records went directly to voicemail, and messages left there were not returned.
