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Mad Men Amidst the competing stories of financial misdeeds, one thing that’s become clear is that Ackerman McQueen has long been an underappreciated force within the NRA. As the New Yorker’s Mike Spies wrote: Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten percent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a lifestyle built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away. There’s a fascinating sociological aspect to the story of how the NRA was transformed into a beacon of insurrectionary red-state culture warriors not by true believers from the gun-loving base, but by twenty-first-century Don Drapers. One longtime NRA employee described the Ackerman employees to Spies as highly skilled mercenaries who “weren’t your folks who were interested in Second Amendment politics” but instead were “your typical New York or Austin types that are excited about doing really big projects and creative projects.” But the political lesson is that if the NRA is largely a spin factory, its highly touted ability to swing elections and shape the culture deserves closer scrutiny. In 2012, Paul Waldman conducted a study of the NRA’s influence over the previous four national elections. He found that the NRA’s success rate in House races was mostly a result of the group endorsing incumbent Republicans in uncompetitive races. In competitive Senate races in which the NRA poured significant resources, the group had a Mets-like won-loss record of 10–12. To be sure, national elections don’t cover the full extent of the NRA’s influence. As Benjamin McKean pointed out in Jacobin last year, the organization’s real strength lies in its base of five million dues payers, who make up both a mass audience and a pool of grassroots leaders to inject the organization’s toxic brew of libertarianism and racial paranoia into the political mainstream. But how much do rank-and-file NRA members, most of whom join the organization for its services like firearms training and insurance, agree with or even pay attention to the group’s propaganda? In his reporting on the NRA-Ackerman standoff, Danny Hakim of the New York Times found that NRATV — Ackerman’s “signature product” — had fewer than fifty thousand unique visitors in January 2019. That’s a stunningly miniscule number given Ackerman’s $40 million annual budget. It’s also wildly out of line with the national attention NRATV understandably receives for its outrageous content.