Detroit—When Donald Trump speaks at the city’s convention center here on Saturday, it will be the second straight weekend he is headlining an event put on by the organization Turning Point Action, which has evolved into a force in politics and is led by a combative founder, Charlie Kirk.
It is a long-time marriage that links Donald Trump to a commentator who made headlines in 2020 for saying women in their 30s are “not at their prime” to date and that he would now think twice about flying with black pilots as a result of diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
Yet it has also provided Donald Trump’s struggling presidential campaign, which lags in both fundraising and organization in the battleground states, with an operational juggernaut.
Rejected by party leaders at the Republican National Committee just a few years ago, Turning Point has quickly transformed from an unruly student movement to one of the biggest ninety-day wonders in all of conservative politics.
This year, Turning Point is dropping tens of millions of dollars on a mega get-out-the-vote effort in three swing states, as a dry run for an organization that suddenly, through the 2024 cycle, finds itself a massive player, with Kirk staking his reputation and his organization’s future on the results—and, potentially, shaping a Trump-powered GOP for a generation.
“Boots on the ground are good; that means something to a point,” he said, before adding, typically gravely, “The real test is always the day after the election, and who wins and who loses.”
Kirk — the founder of Turning Point, which has been a lightning rod in GOP politics for years, giving voice to the millions of his listeners tuning in weekly to hear his critiques of feminism, diversity programs or the state of progressivism on college campuses. But now the group is more than just loud.
More than ferreting out idealogical traitors, the Club provided an array of tools to empower conservative insurgents and, with the new strength in numbers, was able to fill a few dozen seats on the RNC with allies, spending tens of millions of dollars on an aggressive GOTV program this year and future cycles as well, making it an increasingly central player in the party apparatus, especially as some of the other, older, activist groups that depend on RNC patronage have seen their influence on the party wane.
Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, called the group’s field program a force multiplier for the Donald Trump team’s resources in critical states. That compliments other recent coordination between the campaign, RNC, and outside groups under a recent FEC advisory opinion allowing this.
“Trump has a massive head start on us,” Hughes said, adding, “Ultimately, we knew that there would be a fundraising gap between Biden and the DNC and Trump and the RNC.
Adding that the Donald Trump campaign is on track to build infrastructure in all battleground states, he said working relationships such as that with Turning Point give them the ability to “deploy campaign and RNC assets more effectively.”
It is a dramatic turnabout from the RNC’s stance on the group at the beginning of the year: with then-chair Ronna McDaniel having long seen Turning Point as a distraction to be avoided, and Kirk himself openly calling for her ouster.
Turning Point arrived with the takeover of the RNC by the Trump campaign, which seemingly welcomed the group in even when it turned on McDaniel, Days earlier, Trump had called on McDaniel to resign following the group’s meeting in January while trashing her leadership.
Several other individuals who were present at the weekend conference in Detroit, including some Republican National Committee members, were also at an invitation-only dinner that Turning Point Action hosted Friday night.
Through a representative, Kirk refused to be interviewed. A Trump campaign official familiar with Kirk’s relationship with the former president and given obscurity to describe it said the pair have a “warm” relationship, speak on occasion and “share a like mind for the common sense conservative cause.”
McDaniel was hardly the only Republican with a jaundiced eye towards Turning Point. Tennessee RNC committee member Oscar Brock, a Trump critic who voted with Turning Point against McDaniel’s 2023 reelection as RNC chair, said he has been able to work constructively with the group’s members, including Arizona committeeman Tyler Bowyer, a key Turning Point leader.
Bowyer, who did not run for RNC in this year’s election that led to McDaniel’s reelection, was one of 18 indicted in Arizona in April over an alleged alternate elector scheme following last year’s election. He has pleaded not guilty.
Brock countered, however, that the Turning Point name gives off a “money grab.”
They raised a lot of money, and then they turn around and poo poo and denigrate the Republican Party at every opportunity until they have a seat at the table,” Brock said. “Is this not how you work, in my mind.
The influence of Turning Point in Republican organizing is also felt as the most influential conservative organizations of the last three decades have gone into a free fall — losing money, hanging partitions between empty chairs in convention halls.
Among the organizations to have been plagued by leadership scandals in recent years are CPAC and the NRA, two groups that were once practically synonymous with respectability and power.
Longtime economic policy influencers such as the Koch Network and Club for Growth have scrambled to come to terms with Trump, while leading anti-abortion groups are also fighting for influence as Donald Trump is increasingly distancing himself from the movement.
So Turning Point has moved in to assume that role. I did not put friends at the RNC. The PAC has pumped tens of millions of dollars into the race thus far, according to a spokesperson, hiring hundreds of field staff in Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan.
So much, in fact, that the I-T group actually published an in-depth post detailing Turning Point’s take on social issues and domestic life (its online shop sells women’s shirts that read “Got raw milk? and “Buy me chickens and tell me I’m pretty” — looks to have especially connected with a young crop of conservatives, many of whom travel from around the country to attend the well-produced events.
“Turning Point, there’s no question in my mind, has really stolen a march, so to speak, on the lion’s share of the conservative movement,” said Gregg Keller, who was executive director of the American Conservative Union as well as CPAC a decade ago.
Just last week, Turning Point hosted Donald Trump at a megachurch in Phoenix for a live “Chase the Vote” town hall, with attendees lining up outside the capacity venue. The summit hosted a Young Women’s Leadership Conference in San Antonio, which featured high-profile speakers like Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Lara Trump.
That same weekend, Turning Point Action’s field reps were on the ground in Ohio for an Ohio Faith Coalition kickoff event outside of Dayton and registering voters at a rodeo in Georgia.
It’s all part of Turning Point Action’s larger mission this year to serve as “America’s ballot chaser army,” a plan where the group is deploying hundreds of staff per state in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan beyond the staff they already had in other states across the country.
Fundraising is still ongoing for what was originally unveiled as a $108 million goal for get-out-the-vote work focused on so-called ballot chasing. The new hires are assigned to small, custom-drawn territories where Turning Point Action has identified hundreds of conservative, low-propensity voters who must be turned out this autumn.
Their research originally found the same in Arizona, which is both where Kirk and the organization are based and where the president publicly showed and shouted his support for overturning the election. More than 121,000 Republicans in GOP Rep. Paul Gosar’s district did not vote in one of the last two presidential elections, and more than 58,000 did not vote in either.
Kirk “took a really calculated gamble on the MAGA populism angle,” succeeding where Keller, a former CPAC staffer, had struggled.
He has done it before and he is there by right and at the right time and said the right thing, properly prognosticated, I guess. ‘And when you bring all of those things together at the same time, it is like catching lightning in a bottle. Source: Politico
