Turning Point Turns Into a Trump Field Operation

When Donald Trump took the stage at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Believers’ Summit on July 26, he kicked off a three-day event in West Palm Beach, Florida centered on urging the 3,300 Christians in attendance “to rise in unity and embrace biblical truth [and] the biblical principle of readiness and obedience,” according to the group’s press release.

Trump’s nearly hour-long speech was riddled with his standard culture war grievances, yet his final call to action was disconcerting, even in light of his track record for saying outrageous things. As he was wrapping up his remarks, the former president urged attendees to “get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians!”

Exactly what Trump meant may be up for debate but his choice of words and the venue at which he said them were deliberate. TPUSA, along with its political arm Turning Point Action, has emerged as one of Trump’s most loyal and valuable allies in his campaign for reelection, and has amplified his ongoing grievances with the 2020 election and unfounded claims of voter fraud.

Turning Point USA

Charlie Kirk and the late Bill Montgomery founded TPUSA in 2012 as an ostensibly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. From its earliest years, the nonprofit focused on promoting conservative values to high school and college students across the country, decrying “leftist” ideas and progressive policies. These efforts included funneling money to right-wing candidates for student government at universities, posting information about professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” and various other “grassroots” youth outreach efforts.

TPUSA has grown rapidly. In its first year, it generated under $79,000 in total revenue, but according to its most recent IRS 990 filing, its revenue ballooned to over $80 million a decade later, during the 2022 fiscal year. Much of this growth can be attributed to increased funding from right-wing megadonors, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and its donor advised fund, the Bradley Impact Fund; the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation; the Dunn Foundation; and others. This massive influx of funding allowed TPUSA to expand its operations and establish itself as both a mainstay of the far Right and as a fundraising Goliath capable of raising roughly $250 million in the past eight years.

In 2019, TPUSA’s sister 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, Turning Point Action, expanded its operations with the acquisition of the chapter-based group Students for Trump. Turning Point Action is legally permitted to engage in political advocacy, including making independent expenditures for or against political candidates. Just two years later, TPUSA launched Turning Point Faith in 2021 to “address America’s crumbling religious foundation by engaging thousands of pastors nationwide” in order to “breathe renewed civic engagement into our churches,” according to a prospectus obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). And in 2022, Turning Point Action created a federal political action committee, Turning Point PAC.

Turning Point’s 2021 prospectus quotes Trump as thanking his “friend Charlie Kirk [for building] one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.”

Embracing the Big Lie 

With Kirk at the helm, Turning Point is now central in right-wing circles, achieving increasing prestige and influence by positioning itself as a staunch champion of Trump. In the 2020 election cycle, Turning Point Action hosted multiple reelection rallies and other events supporting Trump’s candidacy, including one with Donald Trump Jr. in Arizona just weeks before the election.

The Washington Post reported in September 2020 that Turning Point Action had paid young people in Arizona to post Turning Point content on their social media accounts without disclosing their affiliation. A month later the Post revealed that Turning Point Action had retained the marketing firm Rally Forge to disseminate deceptive, pro-Trump political content on its behalf. This included posts and messages that cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots, and promoted the false claim that 28 million mail-in ballots went missing in the past four elections.

But it wasn’t until after Election Day and it became clear that Trump hadn’t won that Turning Point threw its full weight behind his Big Lie of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election. With 1.8 million followers at the time, Kirk used his personal Twitter account to pump out false and misleading claims of election fraud, including the baseless conspiracy known as SharpieGate. He also tweeted a photo of a flier that proclaimed: “Democrats want to steal this election from you” and urged Trump supporters to attend a “protect the vote” rally at the Maricopa County, Arizona elections headquarters.

While 2020 ballots were still being counted, Kirk led an Arizona protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix on November 6, CMD first reported. The #StoptheSteal protests in swing states were deeply tied to the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive Christian Right group in which Kirk is a member.

Turning Point Action went on to play a central role in organizing the March to Save America rally held in Washington on January 6, 2021, the event that precipitated the violent assault on the Capitol a couple of hours later. According to ProPublica, Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren used the group to help obscure the source of donations made to support the rally, and Turning Point Action was one of the organizations listed as a cosponsor. Leading up to it, Kirk predicted the event “would likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history” and claimed to be sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.”

After the violence erupted, Kirk was forced to backtrack publicly and deleted the tweet. But just a few days later he downplayed the severity of the riot in an interview, saying, “Just because you do something that is regrettable does not mean that you are planning an armed insurrection against the United States government.”

Two individuals with deep ties to TPUSA also took part in the fake electors scheme. Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer and former Communications Chief Jake Hoffman both signed a fraudulent document in an attempt to pose as Arizona electors for Trump, despite Biden having won the state. In February of this year, Bowyer asked the Republican National Committee (RNC) to formally acknowledge that state Republican leaders and Trump’s team orchestrated the fake electors plot and to “immediately indemnify” all those who participated in it.

Turning Point’s Growing Influence

Despite Turning Point Action’s involvement with Trump and the events of January 6, the organization has emerged relatively unscathed. While Facebook/Meta and Twitter/X permanently banned Rally Forge, neither platform penalized TPUSA, meaning that the organization’s vast online network has continued to disseminate far-right misinformation unchecked. And although Bowyer and Hoffman were indicted in April 2024 for their roles in the fake electors plot, TPUSA and its leaders were removed enough from the violence on January 6 to avoid legal implications.

Turning Point has instead gained access to the most powerful and consequential spheres within the GOP. Taking advantage of his newfound influence, Kirk publicly lobbied against Ronna McDaniel, the longtime chair of the RNC, who was ousted earlier this year due to ongoing tension with Trump and his campaign. According to NBC News, a former senior RNC official admitted that Kirk and TPUSA “played a humongous role” in convincing “Trump’s orbit” that McDaniel needed to go. And TPUSA successfully sponsored a resolution adopted by the RNC claiming that “the Left” was engaged in “voting manipulation schemes” and calling for “anti-counterfeit ballot printing,” hand counting ballots, limits on mail-in voting, and a ban on ballot drop boxes.

Turning Point Action also organized the Restoring National Confidence summit in January 2024, a two-day event held in Las Vegas and designed to rival the RNC’s winter meeting in the same city. The “shadow summit” brought conservative activists and personalities together with local GOP chairs and committee members in order to organize for Trump’s reelection campaign, with election denialism front and center. War Room host Steve Bannon appeared as a guest on an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show recorded during the summit, where he stated, “If we had had this meeting, of Turning Point and what you’re doing right now, in January of 2020, Donald J. Trump would be starting the fourth year of his second term.”

Other prominent election deniers such as Jenny Beth Martin (a CNP member) of Tea Party Patriots and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell were featured at the event, both of whom discussed large-scale training of “poll watchers” and other efforts to stop Democrats from “stealing” the 2024 election.

Chase the Vote

Turning Point Action’s current project is perhaps its most ambitious yet: a massive voter outreach initiative in battleground states dubbed “Chase the Vote.” The group aims to raise more than $100 million to harvest early votes in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. With a purported army of “1,000+ field organizers,” the goal is to connect with and mobilize Republican-leaning low propensity voters, meaning those who have not voted in the past two elections.

Chase the Vote seeks to encourage early and mail-in voting specifically, methods that were widely disparaged and rejected by the GOP in 2020. This election cycle, however, Turning Point Action says it is employing “huge numbers of door knockers to win the ballot game at the mailboxes.” Partner organizations supporting the effort include Early Vote Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, America First Works, Run GenZ, Moms for America, Community Action Network, and College Republicans of America.

“It is easier for a Republican to win in this election cycle than in 2020,” Kirk told CNP members at a September 2023 meeting. “It requires fewer states [and] more specifically [just selected] counties” in certain swing states.

The messaging underpinning Chase the Vote represents an about-face from the relentless and baseless accusations of voter fraud due to early voting peddled by the Republican Party over the past few years. The sudden pivot is obviously tactical in nature, as several years of fomenting distrust around absentee and mail-in voting among Republican voters has put the party’s candidates at a major disadvantage electorally. Chase the Vote is the Right’s answer to a problem they themselves manufactured out of thin air.

According to the New York Times, Turning Point Action’s project is one of the largest and most expensive undertakings on the Right to encourage Republicans to vote early. A spokesperson for the organization recently told Salon that Chase the Vote is being run out of the 501(c)(4), and that it has raised “tens of millions of dollars” for the project, which would be orders of magnitude more that what it reported raising in its latest tax return.

Turning Point Action has not reported making any independent expenditures this election cycle, although its PAC has reported raising $2.8 million. If Turning Point Action runs Chase the Vote without expressly advocating for Trump’s election, the true amount raised for the operation and where the money came from will remain hidden from the public.

Turning Point Action is working “in direct coordination” with the Trump campaign on this massive push for early and mail-in voting, a relationship confirmed by Kirk during an interview in July. Organizations like Turning Point Action are not allowed to coordinate their “independent” activities or messages with political campaigns. However, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) released an advisory opinion in March clarifying that since “canvassing literature and scripts are not public communications, or coordinated expenditures,” they are legal for the PAC to deliver.

“We’re allowed to work in harmony on doors and canvassing,” Kirk affirmed during that interview. “That’s what the law says.”

“We are going to make November too big to rig and we are going to overwhelm the ballot boxes,” Kirk declared during a town hall event sponsored by Turning Point Action and its PAC in June. “We are going to out-register them. We are going to outwork them.”