Carly Fiorina's Super PAC Spent All Day on an Elaborate 'Back to the Future' Parody, and No One Noticed

Maybe your office did some fun, zeitgeisty Back to the Future branding for Back to the Future Day today. Great work! That was a nice way to win some #engagement. And hey look at that! The Republicans running for president have seen that movie too, so they made Twitter jokes about it as well. Neat.

But it looks like Carly for America, a Super PAC in support of Carly Fiorina, may have taken the whole thing a little further than it should have. Staffers created an elaborate would-be hoax, complete with a Twitter account, a dedicated website, and an effects-laden video featuring a Doc Brown impersonator, all of which feed into each other as one big, weird marketing gimmick for her 2016 presidential run.

And no one seems to have noticed.

The video above is embedded, incredibly enough, at 102115.com. Campaigners apparently went to the trouble of buying one of the domains that correspond to the date Marty and Doc arrived in the future, and linked to it all day from a Twitter account named @DocBrown102115.

The narrative here seems to be that Doc Brown is sending transmissions back from 2020, when some Democrat has already ruined America with government overreach. One of the transmissions is the video—shot on VHS apparently, suggesting a backstory in which Doc Brown has smuggled 1985-era AV equipment with him to the future. But most of the transmissions are tweets, and if you click the link in each tweet, you can find out what to do to save Doc from this fate. (Spoiler: It's vote for Carly Fiorina)

It's Doc from the future! Visit — Doc Brown (@DocBrown102115)October 21, 2015

Had the Fiorina campaign somehow been the only one exploiting the whole Back to the Future thing, this gambit could have been brilliant. A surge of internet enthusiasm could have been the shot in the arm to her poll numbers, which took a dive this week and signal an end to her run as the Republican Party's Next Big Thing.

But reality being what it is, @DocBrown102115 has only accumulated 43 followers, despite being faithfully retweeted by Carly for America staffers all day long. At press time, the account was still tweeting a couple of times an hour, and the flagship YouTube video had not yet broken 1,000 views.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Note: A previous version of this article misstated this campaign as the actions of Carly Fiorina's official staff rather than her Super PAC.