One day each month, Charlie Kirk, one of the country’s most influential Republican activists, holds an event called Freedom Night in America at Dream City Church, a Pentecostal megachurch on the outskirts of Phoenix. “I truly believe that God has voted early in this election,” he said on a Wednesday in early October, addressing well over 1,000 people from a stage bathed in red, white and blue lights. “I believe that God voted early on July 13, when he spared the life of Donald Trump.”
Kirk was only 18 when he helped found the group Turning Point USA as a sort of youth wing of the Tea Party, and for years it was a secular, libertarian-leaning organization. But as the MAGA movement has grown more explicitly Christian nationalist, so has he. “I do not believe that if you love the Lord, read the Bible and call yourself a Christian, that you can vote for Kamala Harris for president,” he said at Dream City.
Today Turning Point has become a pillar of the Republican Party, especially in the swing state of Arizona, where Trump’s campaign has outsourced much of its ground operation to the group. Its strategy, which it calls “chase the vote,” is to tap into new parts of the electorate by targeting what the campaign calls “low-propensity voters,” the sort of alienated, disconnected people, especially men, who’d presumably gravitate toward Trump if they could be bothered to cast ballots at all. “We’re going to make it too big to rig on Election Day,” said Kirk.
This untested approach carries obvious risks for the Trump campaign. Movements sometimes imagine they can bring new people into the voting pool as a way of avoiding the compromises necessary to reach those who are already there, but it rarely succeeds. Just look at Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign in 2020, which counted on mobilizing the politically disengaged with a fiery populist message, only to lose decisively in Michigan. Maybe the right-wing version of this game plan will work, but no one will know until after Election Day.
At Dream City, though, I started to understand why the Trump campaign feels that it needs to rely on irregular voters in Arizona to augment the traditional Republican electorate. Kirk’s guest for October’s Freedom Night was Ben Carson, the housing secretary in the Trump administration. Much of what they said was MAGA boilerplate. But a surprising subtext of their conversation was the problems that Trump’s character and personality create for Republican turnout.
How is it, asked Kirk, that some Christians are voting for Harris? “You know what they say, well, ‘Donald Trump is mean,’ and all these different things,” said Kirk. He made the familiar argument that America needs a strongman, invoking the example of Samson, the biblical hero who massacred a Philistine army using only a donkey’s jawbone.
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