Americana

Charlie Kirk’s strategy: Fight every culture war, win every election

THE SCENE

LAS VEGAS – In a Planet Hollywood hotel ballroom, a few steps away from the Criss Angel Theater, around 200 Republican Party activists worked on their battle plans. The Republican National Committee would not save them. They would save themselves.

“No more culture of losing,” Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk told an audience of RNC members, GOP county chairs, and plugged-in activists. “Embrace Donald Trump. Don’t fight Donald Trump. Embrace what he’s brought to the party. It’s a populist, people-centered movement, and this is what the oligarchs fear the most.”

The two-day Restoring National Confidence summit was built to tweak Ronna McDaniel’s party committee, whose 168 members were about to meet in another hotel on the strip. Both meetings unfolded as the RNC released its weakest yearly fundraising numbers of McDaniel’s tenure.

TPUSA, with annual revenue not far off the RNC’s, had been building an alternative power base for years. It advocated non-stop “relational” organizing, developing an app that its allies could use to find votes. It had identified low-propensity voters — “disengaged voters,” as Arizona RNC member Tyler Bowyer called them — and put their information in binders for conference attendees. And it had built an influential media network, including Kirk’s show, which revels in the weekly churn of cultural battles that obsess the young, online right.

One host last week had expounded at length on the potential “psyop” of the Kansas City Chiefs making it to the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift endorsing Joe Biden — a topic that came up several times on stage in Las Vegas. Democrats, explained Bowyer and pundit Jack Posobiec, would use Swift’s fame to engage those lower-propensity, low-information voters.

The same week, Kirk had caused his own uproar by lashing out about diversity efforts at airlines — “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like boy I hope he’s qualified,” he said on his show — and posting at length about the criminal records of the Central Park Five, after one of them, the recently elected New York City Council Member Youssef Salem, was pulled over by police. Earlier in the month, he’d commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day by remarking upon the civil rights leader’s “awful” personal life. The comments drove shocked media coverage — and, according to Kirk, getting no blowback “outside of one donor.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Kirk’s group started as an effort to supercharge conservative outreach to young people. But the Vegas conference was a reminder of how vastly its kingmaking ambitions within the Republican party have grown. The fact that Kirk and Turning Point’s stable of podcasters have become some of the MAGA movement’s premier podcasting shock jocks has, if anything, appeared to help that effort, building its credibility among the GOP base at a moment the RNC is shedding its own.

One year ago, Kirk and the more rebellious RNC members took a run at McDaniel and lost. The chair won a fourth term with 111 votes, to 54 for California RNC member Harmeet Dhillon and four for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. McDaniel, at the time, chided Kirk and Dhillon for “trying to take over the RNC,” shortly after the GOP in Arizona — where Kirk lived, and where TPUSA had implemented its strategies to shape the party — had lost key races.

Dhillon is now representing Trump in his challenge to states that have cited the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause to block him from the ballot; Lindell was at Kirk’s summit, talking the crowd through his challenges to the 2020 election. TPUSA had remained resolutely pro-Trump as the RNC tried to run a neutral primary, and that was why it could be trusted, according to the luminaries on stage.

“The forces of the world are against him, including all the money and all the power in the Republican Party,” Steve Bannon told the crowd on Tuesday. “That’s what the RNC has. They’ve been harnessing the donor money to stop Trump. They should not get another penny.”

Around two dozen RNC members stopped by the alternative summit, sitting in the front row for strategy sessions, chatting in the hallways about why they’d given up on party leadership.

“I would love for Ronna McDaniel to let us know that she’s stepping down,” said Fanchon Blythe, an RNC committeewoman from Nebraska. “The RNC is a bunch of fluff.”

Some talk in the hallways speculated on when McDaniel might go and who should replace her. In training sessions, the question was bigger: How could Republican activists build a permanent infrastructure, one that always beat the left?

Kristina Karamo, the ousted MAGA chair of the Michigan GOP, met allies who wanted to help reverse her purge. Bannon hosted hours of his War Room podcast, passing the microphone to local party leaders who felt let down by HQ. Donald Trump Jr. thanked Kirk and the audience for being “the tip of the spear,” fighting where too many people had conceded.

“People want to know, what are we gonna do to save our country?” Karamo told Semafor. “We can’t let the internal conflict become the dominating factor — and then that becomes what we focus on instead of saving the country.”

Plenty of Republicans see Karamo’s politics — and TPUSA’s — as the source of that conflict. She won her chairmanship after running and losing a 2022 race for secretary of state, which she never conceded; she’d won that nomination after working as a 2020 poll watcher and appearing across conservative media as an on-the-ground expert on the fraud she saw. She was ousted after complaints about the party’s shrinking events and flatlining fundraising, with her opponents picking ex-Rep. Pete Hoekstra to replace her.

The problem for the official party apparatus, though, is that it can’t reach the most disgruntled MAGA voters, who tend to view the world a lot like Karamo. TPUSA thinks it can. Even Hoekstra made a brief stop at their conference on his way to the RNC meeting.

“Type in ‘Wisconsin conservatives.’ A lot of election integrity groups exist on Telegram,” Turning Point Action enterprise director Brett Galaszewski said at one training session. “These are prime crowds for recruiting.”

One of the newest RNC officials at the conference was Gina Swoboda, the new chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who won that role after Senate candidate Kari Lake released an audio recording of former chair Jeff DeWit telling her that “very powerful people” might offer her money to quit. DeWit, who’d once called TPUSA “more powerful than the RNC,” had handed his job to a Trump campaign alum who’d spent years publishing voter rolls to find evidence of fraud

“I’m wearing the armor of God,” Swoboda told Bannon during one of his conference livestreams. “I think that the reason that God made me my nerdy election self is for this time.”

THE VIEW FROM A SKEPTIC

Marc McMain, the party chair of Walton County, Georgia, said that he’d come to the conference to learn best practices. He found some, but wasn’t swayed by the talk about challenging the 2020 election. He confronted Jack Posobiec when he suggested that Gov. Brian Kemp, by not finding a way to reverse Trump’s Georgia defeat, bore responsibility for the deaths of soldiers. And he was unmoved by presentations alleging 2020 election fraud by mathematician Doug Frank and Mike Lindell.

“God bless him, but that’s not my wheelhouse,” McMain said. “I think there was nefarious activity in the election, but, you know, I just want to win the next race. I can’t stand that faction of our party that wants to shoot within the tent.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

McDaniel’s RNC kept the press out of its winter meeting, but pushed back on the TPUSA storyline of a well-fed party elite that never did anything. The RNC tallied up 73 trainings across the country in 2023, with more 2,100 attendees; that included four trainings in D.C. that county chairs were invited to attend. The party said it offered help, to any GOP official who wanted it, on basically everything — handling press, turning out the vote, and advertising online. And if TPUSA was going to keep training poll watchers and contacting voters, the party had no problem.

NOTABLE

• In the New York Times, Neil Vigdor reports on the Michigan GOP’s power struggle in Las Vegas, “a microcosm of the lingering tensions between the party’s far-right wing and its old guard.”
• In Puck, Tara Palmeri talks with RNC members about the comeback talk they got from McDaniel; 2023 was a lousy fundraising year, and the party was close to figuring out a workable abortion message.

Minnesota. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer led calls for Rep. Ilhan Omar to resign, based on a misleading translation of remarks the Democrat made at a Jan. 27 celebration of a Somalian election result. After an official with the breakaway republic of Somililand posted the speech, with captions claiming that Omar had declared herself “Somalian first,” Emmer called it a “slap in the face,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called on her to be deported, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a resolution to censure her.

The Minnesota Reformer published a translation refuting the original claim; Omar had never said “Somalian first.” In a statement, Omar said she felt “embarrassed” for Emmer, and her Democratic primary opponents were more cautious than the GOP. Don Samuels, who nearly defeated Omar in a 2022 primary, said in a statement that he’d “review an independent translation” before reacting.

Schiff for Senate, “Two Visions.” Mail ballots for California’s all-party March 5 primary go out next week, and Rep. Adam Schiff is trying to nudge Republican Steve Garvey into the general election by attacking him as a MAGA Republican. It’s a reliable tactic in the state, which has held “jungle” primaries for 12 years — Gov. Gavin Newsom elevated a weak Republican rival in 2018, getting the easy November matchup he wanted, instead of a potentially competitive race against a fellow Democrat. Rep. Katie Porter, who is polling close to Garvey, immediately accused Schiff of “boxing out qualified Democratic women candidates.”

Suozzi for Congress, “Border.” The Republican ad buys in New York’s 3rd Congressional District — formerly held by George Santos, thus the special election — have focused almost completely on illegal immigration. The toughest hit: a clip of Tom Suozzi, the Democrat who used to hold the seat, saying he’d “kicked out ICE” as Nassau County executive. Suozzi’s response runs back a 2018 Fox News interview in which he denounced the campaign to “abolish ICE,” embraced (and later abandoned) by Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Joe Biden for President, “Confused.” As Nikki Haley campaigns against Donald Trump, Democrats are clipping every one of her attacks — especially the ones on Trump’s mental acuity. Two of them make it into this digital spot (“I think he’s declining”), capped with Biden calling Trump “confused.” Polling has shown Biden at a massive disadvantage when voters are asked which candidate is more mentally sharp, and Democrats want to narrow that.

CNN has conducted just three head-to-head polls testing Trump against Biden, with Trump ahead each time, driven by Biden’s low approval rating — just 38% here. This is the first CNN poll offering Haley as an option, and she runs stronger with every demographic than Trump. Republican voters simply don’t believe it. Seventy-two percent of them say that the party has a “better chance of winning the presidency” if Trump is nominated, up from 51% when the primaries began. Just 43% of white voters with college degrees think a Trump alternative (meaning Haley) would run stronger than Trump.

Haley’s problem in her home state mirrors her basic problem in New Hampshire: Republicans who know both her and Trump prefer the former president. Since September, as the rest of Trump’s competitors dropped out, his favorable rating among GOP voters has risen from 60% to 66%. Haley’s has dropped from 59% to 45%, and 43% of primary voters say they’d be “upset” or “dissatisfied” if she became the nominee; just 29% say that about Trump. Haley runs strongest with the sort of voters who backed her last week, taking 61% of non-Republicans, who can vote in this primary, so long as they don’t show up for the Democratic primary tomorrow.

White House. Wednesday was the deadline for last quarter’s FEC filings, a trove of data about the campaigns getting underway and the candidacies that had already collapsed. The highlights:

Joe Biden and the Democrats. Over a miserable period for his campaign — nonstop stories about low poll numbers, the last-minute candidacy of Dean Phillips — Biden raised $33 million, as the DNC and its joint fundraising committee with the president raised another $64 million. Phillips raised just over a million dollars from donors, and put $4 million of his own money into the campaign, ending the year with just over $360,000 to spend. Marianne Williamson raised more ($3.4 million since the start of 2023), and loaned herself nearly $500,000, ending the year with just over $208,000. Biden and his campaign groups: $117 million.

Donald Trump. He raised $19 million in the last three months of the year; all told, Trump campaign groups ended 2023 with around $70 million to spend. That was after more than $55 million went to legal fees, an unprecedented expense for a presidential candidate.

Ron DeSantis. His campaign and its super PAC allies raised a total of $154 million last year, with diminishing returns — and in the final quarter, diminishing revenue. From October through the end of 2023, his campaign raised just $3.7 million from individual donors, and he ended the year with $9.7 million to spend.

DeSantis’s killer app was supposed to be his super PACs. Never Back Down started the campaign with a $82.5 million cash infusion from his 2022 re-election PAC, a chunk of the more than $200 million he’d raised in that race. The money simply wasn’t there for the White House bid. Never Back Down raised $14.5 million between June and December, and by mid-December the DeSantis operation was directing donors to a new PAC, Fight Right, which raised $13.3 million in a hurry. Most of that – $9.6 million – was handed over from Never Back Down.

Nikki Haley. Her campaign and super PAC avoided every mistake made by the DeSantis operation. Haley for President hoarded cash while the super PAC, SFA Fund, went on the air in Iowa and New Hampshire. The result: Haley’s campaign ended the year with $14.6 million left to spend, $5 million more than DeSantis. SFA Fund raised $67.3 million last year, $50.1 million of it in the last six months. Its mission was keeping Haley afloat until the race narrowed down, and it succeeded, with nearly all of that money flying out the door; the super PAC entered 2024 with just $3.6 million.

Charlie Kirk had more to say about Turning Point USA’s ambitions, before and after its visit to RNC turf. During a break in the conference, he talked with Americana about his influence in the GOP, the extremists the group had distanced itself from, and why he believed his commentaries on race weren’t hurting his goal of finding and mobilizing more non-white conservatives.

Americana: What do you want to come out of this conference?

Charlie Kirk: It’s mission critical, victory in November. That’s not a mystery, right? I was present in 2020, and there were a lot of assurances, a lot of promises, by the existing infrastructure that is largely not changed, from personnel to the philosophy and mechanics. And I’m not going to sit idly by and let that happen again.

We were taken by surprise by 10 or 12 different attack vectors in 2020. And we’re told that everything’s fine, with no evidence of that. After many, many attempts at trying to get their attention, that hasn’t changed. Competition is the driver of excellence. That’s one of our belief systems here. So why not host what it should be with some of the attendees of the RNC meeting later this week? What we believe really makes or breaks our elections is county chairs. We think county chairs are some of the least appreciated, most important elements in a modern political apparatus.

Americana: How ready are people for the primary to be over?

Charlie Kirk: The appetite for a continued primary, at this point, is very cloistered in wealthy circles. And not even all wealthy circles. I would say that the majority of donors I talk to want this primary over. It just makes you wonder why Nikki Haley’s continuing to run. The sooner we wrap up this primary, the better; every dollar, every resource is precious, and this is an unnecessary kind of annoyance. I have no fear that she’s going to gain all this traction in Texas or in Florida or in California where the delegate count is extraordinary. I do have a fear that it can unnecessarily extend and delay a healing process.

In politics, after primaries, time heals all wounds. It just does. I’m friends with people and we used to hate each other. Every month is going to heal what some of the people on TV are saying. “Oh, 20% or 30% of people won’t vote for Trump. Yeah, but if you end the primary effectively now, will they still feel that way in June? Probably not. And if 2016 is instructive, it shows that they do come home. In fact, you can crack 90-95% of registered Republicans to come home to the nominee.

Americana: Have the Trump and DeSantis people already come together?

Charlie Kirk: I think that there was some initial acrimony out of the gate, now largely healed. I mean, I’m sitting down with one of them — Steve Cortes, who’s a friend of mine, he went over to DeSantis, but we’re having a meeting this week, and we’re all good. I don’t even think about DeSantis anymore, and I mean, in the positive way. Like, that page is turned. That’s old news, honestly.

Americana: On the show, you talked about Speaker Johnson calling you to talk about the border deal. What are you mobilizing to stop that?

Charlie Kirk: Well, first of all, I don’t think we know what’s in the border deal. How dare you criticize it? We’re not going to show it to you! It’s one of the weirdest political stories I’ve seen in quite some time. [Sen. James] Lankford goes on TV and says, it’s a great deal and I’m not going to show it to you. Also, the people that are attacking it are awful. Then can we see the text?

I’ve been awfully critical of Speaker Johnson. To his credit, he called me and I thought he was really, really magnanimous to call me because I’ve been awfully spicy towards him. Most politicians will send their little janissaries after me or whatever, so I give him a lot of credit for that. Yes, I hope that the border deal collapses.

Americana: About the TPUSA ambassador network — how do you police extremists who want in? We’ve seen a few cases recently of people appearing as ambassadors, saying that Jews run everything.

Charlie Kirk: I’ll say two things. One, we’re redoing the whole ambassador program. We’re rethinking it, reimagining it, in structure and attitude and philosophy. But look — some single individual who says that all Jews are pedophiles? Yeah, that’s not a tough call.

So, you love the truth. I’ll send you a piece of clip, back from the fall, before the October 7 stuff. There’s a guy that comes up with Dennis Prager on stage, and he’s a real anti-Semite. Turns out he’s like this neo-Nazi guy, and I basically told him, in so many words, get the hell out of the event. If you go back many years ago, I’ve had a spirited history with such forces.

Americana: Groypers showing up and making trouble because you support Israel.Charlie Kirk: I love Israel. I always have.

Americana: So what’s the line? You’re winning, someone wants to join the winning team, but they have this belief so they’re out.

Charlie Kirk: It’s hard for me to give you a formula. Let me use the line that determined the pornography decision at the Supreme Court: You know once you see it.

Americana: TPUSA has done a lot to reach out to a diverse set of people — Black Americans, Hispanic Americans. You also, on the show, are dealing with topics that get condemned by the SPLC. Telling people you were lied to about George Floyd, you were lied to about MLK. How do you balance those topics with the outreach?

Charlie Kirk: I don’t think it’s an either/or. At least from our grassroots experience, from Blexit and others, we see coalitions strengthening and building. But honestly, it’s not much of a political calculus. I don’t like to sit around and think: is this topic going to help or hurt? I’d say it’s more of an instinct. The reaction I received from black voices who I really trust — Candace Owens, Pierre Wilson, Brandon Tatum and others — is that there’s this mass reconsideration movement in Black America. Have the idols, the motifs, the themes that we’ve been lifting up, been benefiting us? And I think they’re willing to reconsider some of those things.

Americana: You were doing this fairly early, with Kanye West — not recent Kanye, but talking about all this with him after he started wearing a MAGA hat.

Charlie Kirk: I don’t know how sizable it is, but I will say completely anecdotally, that I have more people of color, that are enthusiastically supportive of the program and the show just from just like, hey, walking into restaurants. I don’t know if that’s macro true, or if it’s confirmation bias. I have no idea, but it’s way more noticeable than it used to be. We make compelling arguments, we pursue truth, and it’s worked so far.

Americana: Have you seen any kind of backlash?

Charlie Kirk: It’s the opposite. More people want to speak with us than ever before. The part that I’m learning is that the audience has a broader scope and just a deeper curiosity than I think we always give them credit for. They might not always agree with it. They might not always like the take, but it’s interesting, and they might learn something. We saw that in the MLK segment. People were like, wow, that’s interesting. I never knew that. It’s been overwhelmingly positive. In any indicating metric that I would be concerned about, there’s no backlash.

• one day until the South Carolina Democratic primary
• six days until the Nevada Republican caucuses
• 11 days until the special election to replace George Santos
• 22 days until the South Carolina Republican primary
• 32 days until Super Tuesday
• 277 days until the 2024 presidential election