Donald Trump doesn’t care about ground game. In Arizona, Turning Point Action is doing it for him

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As polls tighten across swing states, former President Donald Trump has faced growing scrutiny about his ground game. A Politico report earlier this week revealed panic among Republican operatives over Trump’s “paltry get-out-the-vote effort,” and raised questions about the campaign’s apparent reliance on third-party groups to manage voter outreach.

Here in Arizona, much of that outreach has been delegated to Turning Point Action, a self-described grassroots political organization led by right-wing evangelical activist Charlie Kirk. In the wake of Trump’s narrow loss of Arizona in 2020, Turning Point has an ambitious plan to galvanize voters this fall.

Antonia Hitchens, reporter at The New Yorker, recently visited Turning Point’s offices in Phoenix, and joined The Show to talk about their strategy starts with redefining what it means to be a Republican.

Full conversation ANTONIA HITCHENS: The party is no longer trying to recruit and kind of pander to voters who they don’t think share the sort of MAGA America First agenda. And so the party has really shifted away from trying to be a Republican Party for every Republican in Arizona.

And it’s much more about kind of, do you believe that the 2020 election was won by Donald Trump or by Joe Biden? And from there you can proceed to decide whether or not you belong in the party anymore.

SAM DINGMAN: So that’s really fascinating on a number of levels, one of them being the idea that the election was stolen. It seems somewhat incompatible with the idea of grassroots, door-to-door, turning people out to vote, traditional electoral process-oriented work that it seems like Turning Point Action is doing here.

HITCHENS: I think for those of us who go to a lot of Trump rallies, it’s astonishing the number of people who will wait in line for a Trump rally for maybe 18 hours overnight, but who have never voted before. And I think in both 2016 and 2020, there were voters like that who, for whatever reason, the RNC and the Trump campaign just didn’t completely manage to tap into.

And so this cycle, they’ve been very clear. This is not about persuasion. It’s not about, can we woo a few former Nikki Haley voters? It’s much more about you’re one of our people. We can assume that based on certain demographics, but you just haven’t been voting for president, and now you’re going to come in to vote.

DINGMAN: Right. So let’s talk about how Turning Point Action is trying to reach those voters.

HITCHENS: Last time in 2020, Trump lost Arizona by 11,000 votes. And by official counts, there are 230,000 Republicans in Arizona who did not vote in the last presidential election. And Turning Point is really trying to cultivate those people to vote this time, sending out people who are from theoretically your same block, and you know them from church, and you have the feeling that you can trust them.

And so this notion of someone comes to your door and says, “Look, I understand that you might have questions about how 2020 went down, but we really think this time is going to be different.” I think it’s making these connections, not just based on the data bringing you to that door, but then based on a more sort of nuanced conversation between people with a shared belief.

DINGMAN: Gotcha. And so tell us a little bit more about having the person who knocks on a prospective voter’s door be somebody that they might recognize as a kindred spirit. There's one guy in particular that you walked around with who was, I believe, a former Marine.

HITCHENS: Yes. So I went door knocking in Scottsdale one morning after going to Super Chase training, with about seven other people who wanted to go turnout voters in extreme heat.

DINGMAN: And we should say that, Super Chase is the name of this strategy that Turning Point Action is using, right?

HITCHENS: Yes. So that’s their branded name for this kind of get-out-the-vote ground game strategy that’s sort of unique.

So when I went walking with Jason, we at one point approached a door where there were two white pickup trucks, one of which had a decal of a .50-caliber bullet. And Jason turned to me and said, “This is one of my guys. This is the kind of man that I want to be able to talk to you, because I think I can get him to come out and vote.”

And so the idea is, let’s talk to people who already believe what we believe and kind of bring them out into the project of voting. Let’s not go to a potential Harris voter’s door and say, “Do you want to swap in your Trump hat for a Harris-Walz hat?” I think that strategy doesn’t seem to them to be a good use of time.

I would add, though, that Trump himself reportedly doesn’t really care about ground game because he thinks having rallies and being the kind of figure he is is so compelling to his base. He doesn’t need to do this kind of old fashioned, traditional, tedious walking around work. He wants to focus on don’t let them steal it.

DINGMAN: That seems like the other really fascinating wrinkle here in your reporting is that this Super Chasing is largely a Turning Point Action-driven project that the Trump campaign has signed off on but doesn’t seem to be coordinating. Is that accurate to say?

HITCHENS: They’ve sort of loosely blessed this. But Trump himself, as you said, I think he doesn’t care about this. And because of a recent FEC ruling that actually allows PACs like this to get involved directly in ground game for candidates, the Trump campaign hasn’t had to spend the same kind of money or devote the same kind of resources.

They’ve been able to say, “We trust you, we like you, and we endorse what you will do for us. And we don’t have to really be there supervising and looking over your shoulder.”

DINGMAN: It seems like potentially a sort of dicey strategy. Because in a close state, if you have an organization that is as seemingly well organized as Turning Point Action, that could be very beneficial. But in a state where there is no Turning Point Action and your campaign doesn’t have a footprint on the ground, it could be a bit of a disadvantage.

HITCHENS: Well, I think what we’re seeing in 2024 is a, I don’t know, three-way marriage of convenience between the RNC, the Trump campaign and groups like Turning Point, where they can align with each other and share resources with each other and share data with each other, and to that end, kind of work on the same project.

But Turning Point is also very conscious of wanting to do this not just for Trump, but to do it for years to come and for elections to come. And they sort of want to build themselves into the hard drive of how we do elections in this country, trying to bring those voters back into the kind of realm of reality where we have elections that function.

And I think that work is very important. You can obviously question whether or not the person that they want to elect is who you might want to elect, but I think their mission comes partly out of this desire to just bring people back into politics.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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