The assessment scored the celebration a 98.6, which one official described as a perfect score adjusted for humility.
WASHINGTON—Responding to polls showing that few Americans approved of the cage matches staged on the South Lawn, the White House on Monday released its own internal assessment finding that the White House UFC event was the most successful presidential celebration in American history.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released before the event found that just 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate and 46 percent considered it inappropriate, with only 31 percent of Republicans approving. Administration officials said those figures measured the wrong things.
“The poll asked the public,” one senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the methodology candidly. “We didn’t ask the public. We measured the event itself, which is a very different exercise.”
Grading the White House UFC Event
The assessment was produced by the White House Office of Commemorative Outcomes, a unit officials confirmed had been established Sunday evening. According to its director, Wendell Marsh, who holds a certification in large-format event scoring, the framework evaluated the celebration across eleven weighted categories.
Those categories included total square footage of American flag deployed, which the office logged at just over 9,000; combined decibel output across the four-hour broadcast; and the number of fighter jets per attendee. A separate metric, flyover tonnage, was described as “well within historic range.”
The event earned an overall 98.6, a figure the office called a perfect score adjusted for humility. By the same framework, officials said, the celebration outscored both the 1976 Bicentennial and the Apollo 11 moon landing, neither of which deployed comparable flag square footage.
A category measuring “patriotism density” returned what officials described as the highest reading the instrument is capable of registering. The office declined to describe the instrument, citing a proprietary methodology, and said the full assessment would not be released.
The framework also introduced a measure the office called the crowd-to-cage ratio and a weighted score for what the assessment termed presence. Officials said presence could not be captured by traditional polling and had therefore been excluded from the public surveys entirely. The category accounted for roughly a third of the final grade.
Asked whether the office that planned the event was the appropriate body to grade it, the official said independence had been preserved. “The people who scored it are not the people who built it,” the official said. “They sit two doors down.”
A Question of Who Was Asked
The celebration, which marked both the president’s 80th birthday and the nation’s 250th anniversary, aired on a streaming service owned by David Ellison, a friend of the president, and was staged with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose chief executive, Dana White, is a longtime ally. A light beer and a cryptocurrency exchange sponsored the broadcast, which tens of thousands also watched from screens at the Ellipse.
Pressed on why the public poll and the internal assessment had reached opposite conclusions, the official said the two efforts had simply surveyed different groups. The administration has previously disputed polls it considered unfavorable.
“They polled Americans,” the official said. “We polled the Americans who were there. Those are the relevant Americans.”
Respondents who told pollsters the event was inappropriate were logged in the assessment under a category the office labeled “not yet aligned.” Officials said that figure was expected to improve once the same framework was applied more broadly.
An official confirmed the office would use the framework going forward, beginning with the president’s approval rating, which the assessment is expected to score considerably higher than recent surveys have. Officials said the White House UFC event would now serve as the baseline against which future celebrations are measured.
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