Donald Trump’s Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers

We are in an era of nail-biter presidential elections. In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than a percentage point, including Wisconsin, the state that notched him an Electoral College victory. In 2016, that exact statement applied to Donald Trump. Polls today suggest 2024 will be similarly close. The get-out-the-vote operations, the so-called “ground game,” may determine the outcome in November. 

This is why it’s bonkers that the Trump campaign has outsourced its ground game to far-right operators with no track record of success. 

CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA. 

Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist. 

Kirk adopted confrontational tactics to put his group on the map, such as “Professor Watchlist,” in which Turning Point attacked college professors for their politics and, in the words of one target, stirred up “harassment from online trolls.”  

The right-wing upstart began, in the Tea Party spirit of the 2010s, with a libertarian economic focus. But now Kirk is waging a vicious culture war through podcasts and other social media with race-baiting tactics (“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”) and Christian nationalist appeals (“There is no separation of church and state.”) 

He also ingratiated himself with the Trumps after working as Donald Trump, Jr’s assistant in the fall 2016 campaign. Early in 2020, Kirk promoted COVID-19 pandemic conspiracy theories, which then-President Trump routinely shared on social media. (Kirk’s mentor Montgomery died in 2020 from COVID-19 complications.) 

Conservative donors have rewarded the Turning Point network for its virulence with more cash every year. The group reported $9.8 million in donations for 2017, $79.2 million for 2022, and a quarter of a billion since 2016. 

But the ability to vacuum up cash does not automatically translate into the ability to boost voter turnout. 

In 2022, the Turning Point network entered the ground game business, mainly in Arizona, where it is headquartered. As the Arizona Republic reported, “Turning Point PAC, the political action committee started by Turning Point USA, spent $494,105 during the 2022 election cycle, including the primary elections. The bulk of that, $377,201, went towards the general election races for U.S. Senate, governor, and Secretary of State in Arizona.” Turning Point’s candidates lost all of those races. 

What did Turning Point do to help on the ground? Per the Arizona Republic: 

Outside of money, Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of the parent non-profit, Turning Point USA, held a string of rallies in key legislative districts. Volunteers who showed up were handed materials provided by Turning Point PAC and sent out to knock on doors and engage voters.  

And, though it did not advocate certain candidates, Turning Point USA, the parent non-profit, started its Turning Point Faith initiative in August 2021 that aimed at persuading Christians to become more civic-minded.  

At monthly events held at a Phoenix megachurch, Kirk would speak about current events and cast political involvement as a spiritual duty to protect the nation from falling under the control of Satan. Excerpts of those events played as part of a half-hour radio show that began airing on dozens of Christian radio stations. 

None of this had any discernible impact. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, Turning Point’s preferred candidate, Kari Lake, led the Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, by 2.4 percentage points in the final FiveThirtyEight poll average. Yet Hobbs won by a 0.7 percentage point margin. Underperforming the polls by 3 points indicates that Lake and her Turning Point comrades got beat on the ground. 

Undeterred, Turning Point last year began shopping around a $108 million get-out-the-vote plan, now called “Chase the Vote,” focusing on Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Then-Chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, gave this plan the cold shoulder. Kirk launched blistering attacks on McDaniel, claiming she was a Democratic plant and urging Trump to dump her. According to Real Clear Politics, McDaniel told Trump that Kirk’s penchant for insulting African Americans, such as saying Martin Luther King, Jr. did not deserve a holiday, would hurt efforts with Black voters. 

Kirk won the fight. McDaniel quit under pressure. Then Trump took Kirk’s suggestion to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as RNC co-chair.  

Republicans suspicious of Kirk told NBC News soon after McDaniel’s February ouster that Kirk pushed for it so Turning Point could take over the 2024 ground game and profit from it: 

At the “Restoring National Confidence” summit, hosted by Turning Point Action ahead of this month’s RNC winter meetings in Las Vegas, state and local GOP chairs were pitched on transitioning their voter outreach and canvassing efforts to an app created by Superfeed Technologies, a company led by Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point USA.  

“This is why he was trying to get rid of Ronna,” [a] Trump ally said. “He shouldn’t make it sound like, ‘Oh, we’re tired of losing. We don’t have an early vote program.’ He should have just said, ‘Listen, he who controls the RNC controls millions of dollars and I want to get my hands on them.’ I mean, that would have been a more honest grift.” 

In October, prominent conservative activist Erick Erickson sensed something fishy with the Turning Point plan, telling the Associated Press, “Any donor who thinks an organization needs $108 million for a three-state grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign is being taken advantage of. It sounds like a grift.” 

Turning Point’s reputation as a grifting operation seems deserved. A 2020 investigation by ProPublica found that “three Turning Point insiders … won lucrative deals from the group to handle its printing, payroll processing and fundraising. The non-profit has also made misleading assertions about its finances to state and federal regulators.” An October 2023 Associated Press investigation found: “The organization also enriched Kirk and his allies … top Turning Point officials collected pricey salaries, enjoyed lavish perks and steered at least $15.2 million to companies they, their friends and associates are affiliated with.”  

Kirk has made out particularly well. He “bought three high-end properties, all worth over a million dollars, which include his new Spanish-style mansion near Phoenix, as well as a nearby apartment and a beachside condo on Florida’s gulf coast.” Yet the report also noted, “for all that money, the group has struggled to help Republicans win general elections.” 

Yet McDaniel is gone. According to Politico, Turning Point has filled “a few dozen seats on the RNC with allies.” And Turning Point is now the central player in the Trump ground game.  

Trump usually likes to hustle rather than be hustled. What would entice him to fall for Turning Point’s scheme? Probably because “Chase the Vote” is premised on a political strategy that comports with Trump’s extremist politics: forget the swing, juice the base. 

As CNN reported: 

“The prevailing wisdom of the consultant class before was, ‘Let’s go to those swing districts and really try and move those voters.’ Well, we don’t agree,” one source familiar with the plans told CNN. “We’re going where the Republicans are. We’re going to drive up [the] score in those areas and get the people that stayed home in 2020 or 2022.” 

This is the logic Turning Point used in 2022 when it struck out in all the major Arizona races. But it’s a comfortable strategy for Trump to accept because he need not woo swing voters.  

In some progressive circles, base-only strategies have been trendy in recent years. But Democratic leaders have largely eschewed such insular thinking and kept courting swing voters, which paid off in 2018, 2020, and 2022.  

If Trump’s ground game grifters ignore the swing, they risk ceding a critical voting bloc to Biden. 

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