Charlie Kirk helped influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election by taking his unabashedly conservative approach to college campuses nationwide, particularly in critical swing states, his reps said Friday.
Kirk, 31, founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to organize students while seeking to "restore traditional American values like patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family and fiscal responsibility," according to the nonprofit's website.
The prominent right-wing activist has since expanded the group's reach to more than 3,500 high school and college campuses nationwide, including events as part of its "You're Being Brainwashed Tour" featuring Kirk and guests like former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
"Millions of Americans are being brainwashed and led to believe the opposite of what's real," Kirk said in a statement announcing his plan in late August. "From immigration and the economy, to science, biology, and faith, the conservative position on these topics is either completely absent, or so contorted and misrepresented that young people aren't being afforded the opportunity to make informed decisions about what they believe. This tour is about changing that."
Originally scheduled as a four-stop jaunt, Kirk's tour ultimately swelled to 25 colleges, including the University of Wisconsin, Kansas State University and the University of Georgia, where he engaged undergraduates on topics ranging from the economy to immigration to liberal bias in academia.
Videos showing Kirk debating young liberal minds across the country soon went viral online, racking up more than 2 billion views as of Friday, according to Turning Point USA's political advocacy arm, Turning Point Action.
"They were linked and shared everywhere, so probably magnitudes more," spokesman Andrew Kolvet told Newsweek of Kirk's footage. "That's just on Charlie's own channels, so it's probably three or four billion when you add it all together, but it's sort of impossible to do that. But everywhere we'd go, all the kids would come up and say, 'I follow you on TikTok, I follow you on YouTube, I love your videos.'"
More than 2.5 million users subscribe to Kirk's YouTube channel, which bills Turning Point USA as the "largest and fastest growing" conservative youth activist group in America. The beloved podcast host who purportedly reaches more than 100 million people monthly across his social media platforms also boasts his direct line to Donald Trump.
"Just got a call from President-elect Trump," Kirk wrote on X late Wednesday. "The man is a machine. He is ready to unify and govern the country. He has more energy than ever. He has a mandate and he knows it."
Kirk's direct connection with young voters, meanwhile, factored heavily into Trump's decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Kolvet said.
"We were tapping into a lot of pent-up frustration, you know, over COVID," he said. "These are kids that their proms and their graduations robbed from them, and they were looking at an America where they were told to downsize their American dream. It's the first generation that didn't feel like they were ever going to be able to own a home, and we were tapping into that."
Some students at the college events frantically tried to grab free "Make America Great Again" hats from Turning Point organizers, Kolvet recalled.
"It was an amazing thing to watch happen," he said. "You'd throw them out into the crowd, and they'd be like wrestling to get their MAGA hat. And so what you'd end up seeing is a sea of red hats, of college kids, of Gen Z kids who were never supposed to be conservatives, they were basically rebelling against a system that told them they weren't allowed to do that."
Kirk's tour allowed some students to have the "courage" to make their conservative political beliefs known, particularly in liberal educational settings, Kolvet said.
"And to be proud of their beliefs and to buck the system," he continued. "And it just caught fire. It caught absolute fire."
Kirk helped Trump win the youth vote in Michigan and nearly had the same result in Wisconsin, while exit polls showed the Republican beating Harris among young male voters nationwide by more than 10 points, Kolvet said.
"And he was supposed to lose the young female vote by 30 [points] – he only lost it by 20," Kolvet continued. "And he won outright the white youth vote for the first time in decades, so this was an absolute historic performance with young people."
Kirk's outreach effort also included stops in late October at Georgia State University, where Kirk was joined by Ramaswamy.
The pair wrangled with students on the upcoming presidential election, with Kirk at one point solely blaming Vice President Kamala Harris for the nation's poor immigration policy and falsely claiming that 325,000 had been "lost" along the U.S.-Mexico border during President Biden's administration, the Associated Press reported.
Kirk went on to defend Trump supporters who sieged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as lawmakers sought to certify Biden's election. Days later, the conservative activist organized a 10,000-person rally for Trump at Gas South Arena in Duluth, Georgia, where he characterized the choice facing voters as a "spiritual battle," while adding that Democrats "stand for everything God hates," according to the Associated Press.
"This is a Christian state," Kirk told the crowd. "I'd like to see it stay that way."
Kirk, who could not be reached for comment Friday, said transforming "supporters into voters" represented Turning Point's most significant impact on the 2024 presidential election.
"You need to do the hard work to turn the low propensity voters and actually get their ballots into boxes, and that requires bodies," Kirk told Fox News on Wednesday. "So, we quietly hired well over 1,000 full-time people across all the battleground states, in Arizona, Wisconsin, partially in Michigan and Pennsylvania."
Kirk's extensive voter outreach efforts regularly outsized similar events by Harris supporters, he said.
"We're drawing three, four, five thousand people and the media wouldn't touch it," Kirk told Fox News. "And the Kamala people would have, like, a little booth with three or four people, and we would register five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred first-time voters."
The expansion of early voting also played a major factor in the youth vote for Trump, Kirk said.
"Think about it: If it's just one day, it's really hard to get first-time voters just to show up on one day," he said. "If you have 30 days, and all of a sudden you have an election month, it allows organizers like that we have Turning Point Action – our ballot-chasers – to be able to find these first-time voters and follow up one, two, three, four, five, six times and get those ballots in the boxes."
Kirk said he believed the grassroots campaign might have played an influential role in reelecting Trump to the White House, contrary to similar efforts by Democrats that focused on overall activity—like knocking on 9 million doors nationwide—instead of data-driven results.
"We were banking votes for Donald Trump and the results speak for themselves," he said. "We won the youth vote in Michigan, nearly won it in Michigan, competitive in the youth vote all across the seven battleground states. Our plan at Turning Point Action worked and I think it might've made a decisive difference in many of these states."
But Kirk's proud victory lap may be somewhat hasty, one veteran political analyst told Newsweek.
"Making that kind of statement might be premature," said Bob Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University in Houston. "That's an ecological fallacy—when you say that we, the Republicans, were able to turn out younger, infrequent voters and the Democrats lost either turnout or people switched. You have to study voters. Counties are not voters; states are not voters—they're aggregations. The sum of the parts might look like the whole, but be nothing like the whole."
Kirk's assertion cannot be truly tested until annotated voter lists are released by L2 Data, which could take several months in some jurisdictions, Stein said.
"My sense is to be careful what you wish for," he told Newsweek, adding that the election appeared to closer reflect a realignment among voting blocs, particularly among Hispanics, college-educated Americans and those in higher income brackets.
Another possible explanation for Trump's lopsided win could be retrospective economic voting, Stein said, referencing Biden's worsening approval rating and a poll last year that revealed 58 percent of people considered their family's financial situation worse or roughly the same as four years ago.
"And that is enough to vote out an incumbent," Stein said. "But in terms of Mr. Kirk's efficacy, I think it's premature. I'm personally waiting for L2, the company that does the best annotation of voters, and I want to see who the hell voted. It will take months before we can answer that question."
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