The RNC took heat last month from some Donald Trump supporters, who noted that the committee had spent tens of millions of dollars on ads boosting its prior nominees, but none on Trump. | AP Photo 2016 RNC starts spending on Trump TV ads The party, which eschewed independent pro-Trump ads, is spending $3 million on coordinated ads boosting its nominee.

The Republican National Committee thought TV ads supporting its presidential nominee were a bad use of its money early in the cycle, but, with polls tightening in the final week of the presidential race, the party committee is funding at least $3 million into TV ads on behalf of the Trump campaign.

Some of the RNC-funded ads attack Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton over the FBI’s announcement last week that it was examining new evidence related to her team’s handling of classified information while she was secretary of state.


The RNC-funded ads are part of a $17.7 million Trump advertising surge in the campaign’s final week, according to an analysis of advertising buys done for POLITICO by The Tracking Firm.

The RNC’s share of the buy comes out of a pool of nearly $24 million in cash that the national party can spend in coordination with the Trump campaign.

“They worked with us to decide what’s the best use of that money,” said RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer, who stressed that most of the coordinated cash was spent not on television ads, but rather on the type of direct voter contact on which the RNC has focused this cycle.

“Because we’ve been able to expand the map, it was, ‘Let’s use this money to continue to expand the map,’ and the idea was that there was greater utility in doing TV ads to expand the map,” he added.

Spicer rejected a question about whether the RNC-funded Trump ads represented a change in course for the RNC. After the 2012 election, the party decided it was going to stop spending money on television ads, and instead shift its resources to building a more robust ground game.

That decision was based on a calculation that it was “not an efficient use of party committee dollars to spend money on television,” RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh explained to POLITICO last month.

Yet, even as the RNC telegraphed this decision well in advance of the presidential race, it took heat last month from some Trump supporters, who noted that the committee had spent tens of millions of dollars on ads boosting its prior nominees, but none on Trump.

But the no-advertising decision applied only to a type of advertising known as independent expenditures, Spicer explained, in which party committees are permitted to spend unlimited amounts of cash, provided they don’t coordinate the messaging and placement with the campaigns. That restriction can make it tricky to implement independent expenditures in a way that matches the strategy of the candidate who is the intended beneficiary.

Coordinated expenditures, on the other hand, must be done in conjunction with the candidate’s campaign, allowing them to shape the decisions about what the ads say and where and when they run.

“It’s their creative,” Spicer said of the RNC-funded Trump ads.

Indeed, the ads in question end with a message saying “Paid for by the Republican National Committee. Authorized by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. Approved by Donald J. Trump.”

Still, legally, it’s the party that controls coordinated expenditures, said campaign finance expert Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of litigation at the advocacy group Common Cause.

“It’s the national party that’s actually making the expenditure, so the decision to cut the check is entirely the decision of the party, not the candidate,” he said. But he added that “by definition, the party is talking to the candidate when the party’s making ‘coordinated’ expenditures, and presumably the party would defer to the candidate’s judgment about whether the party should be making the expenditure, what should be in the ad, etc.”