Heading into the 2024 election, the conservative group Turning Point Action made a risky and expensive bet as it tried to fix Republicans’ early-voting problem: It zeroed in on infrequent voters who seemed to lean to the right.
Calling its effort “Chase the Vote,” the group focused heavily on Arizona, where it is based and says it spent tens of millions of dollars to help elect Donald J. Trump. Hundreds of paid staff members worked to build enduring relationships with Arizonans whom Turning Point saw as friendly to Republicans, targeting a smaller universe of voters than traditional canvassing operations.
Turning Point’s gamble appears to have paid off, at least in Arizona.
Newly released voting data compiled by TargetSmart, a Democratic polling firm, shows a distinct G.O.P. advantage among infrequent voters: About 30,000 registered Republicans in Arizona who had not voted since at least 2018 cast a ballot this year. Democrats turned out just 20,000 of the same types of voters.
Among slightly more reliable voters — those who skipped the 2022 midterm elections but voted in other recent elections — Republicans still held an edge in Arizona, turning out 185,000 compared with 157,000 for Democrats. And the G.O.P. had an even greater advantage among first-time voters, with 202,000 such Republicans casting a ballot and just 145,000 such Democrats doing the same.
One of the many unorthodox elements of Mr. Trump’s campaign was how it partnered its ground game with allied groups like Turning Point and America PAC, the super PAC funded by Elon Musk. These groups, called “coordinated canvassing partners,” both shared data with and received it from the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign.
While these groups carried out parallel efforts in battleground states like Wisconsin, Turning Point had the largest footprint in Arizona, and its staff members there kept up frequent contact with targeted voters in an effort to build deeper personal relationships.
Mr. Trump won Arizona by more than 187,000 votes, a relatively wide margin that cannot be attributed to a single group. But the emerging picture adds credence to a theory pushed by Turning Point and embraced by other conservative groups: that Mr. Trump could pick up large numbers of infrequent or first-time voters who leaned Republican, and that he did not need to devote his energy to appealing to true swing voters or moderate Democrats.
“Arizona is what we threw the kitchen sink at,” said Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point’s chief operating officer. “We weren’t focused on door knocks and door-hangers hung and things like that. Those are kind of filler stats. We were more focused on relationships built. So when you’re focused on relationships built, you actually know who that person is, something about them, what makes them tick, what moves them.”
A Trump-friendly environment
Not every Republican strategist is ready to call Turning Point’s methods a success.
The group benefited from a political environment in which Democrats were dragged down by an unpopular incumbent president, stubborn inflation and fears about immigration. The Trump campaign itself also encouraged voters to cast ballots early.
Overall turnout by low-propensity voters in Arizona was not necessarily higher than in previous elections, either. But in 2016, Democrats kept pace with Republicans among such voters in Arizona. In 2020, Republicans enjoyed an edge over Democrats among these voters, and Democrats held even among first-time voters.
Karl Rove, a longtime Republican strategist, has been critical of running get-out-the-vote and field operations outside of the campaign. He said in an interview that having organizations like Turning Point take the lead left critical voter data in silos instead of in a central hub and prevented it from “being built on in the future.” But Trump campaign officials said they had data sharing agreements with almost every outside group, including Turning Point, and that those partnerships allowed their field operation to double the 2020 effort.
Other Republican strategists have said Turning Point struggled to deploy its “Chase the Vote” program fully in other battleground states, including Wisconsin and Michigan. Data on turnout by low-propensity voters is not yet available in those states.
Mr. Bowyer — who was indicted this year in Arizona on charges of serving as a fake elector after the 2020 election — acknowledged that the group had not been able to scale up its operation in Wisconsin to the same size that it did in Arizona. But he said it had still run a large statewide effort that turned out more than 70,000 voters.
“We would have liked to do more in Wisconsin,” Mr. Bowyer said. He added that while “the outcomes that we had in Arizona were far better than we expected,” the group’s performance in Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump also won, “was also very successful.”
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point, said that while the group had initially intended to create a statewide effort in Michigan, it later made a strategic decision to focus solely on the state’s competitive Seventh Congressional District “so we could devote more resources to the statewide efforts in Wisconsin and Arizona, both states we believe to have made a determinative impact.” The group said it had helped turn out more than 16,000 voters in the district, which flipped to Republican control.
Republicans believe their influx of new voters stems from several factors, including Mr. Trump’s unconventional style and his embrace of right-wing podcasters and YouTube stars. (Turning Point’s founder, Charlie Kirk, is one of those influential new-media figures, with a growing TikTok presence.)
Mr. Bowyer himself attributed part of the group’s success to the political environment.
Among low-propensity voters, he said, “Trump was very good for our populist message.”
The origins of the strategy
Turning Point developed its “Chase the Vote” program after painful Republican losses in the 2022 midterms. Republican strategists believed that Democrats’ wide advantage in early voting was decisive in numerous close races, including contests in Arizona for governor, Senate and other statewide offices.
Mr. Bowyer and other Turning Point officials recognized that it would be difficult to bring about a wholesale shift in voting behavior among Republicans in a single election cycle.
After years in which Mr. Trump and other top Republicans had falsely attacked early voting and mail voting as rife with fraud, many of the party’s voters believed that the only safe way to cast a ballot was in person on Election Day.
But Turning Point reasoned that voting early or by mail — more flexible methods than traveling to the polls on Election Day — were effective methods to turn out low-propensity and first-time voters.
And even as several Turning Point officials continued to criticize early voting this year, they argued that Republicans needed to change their habits under the current rules so that they could win and overhaul election laws.
The group built a list of roughly 400,000 low-propensity voters to target across Arizona. Rural areas provided the greatest pickup opportunities, but Turning Point also focused on densely populated areas that leaned red. The state’s East Valley, which includes Mesa and other areas southeast of Phoenix, was crucial, Mr. Bowyer said, with “tens of thousands of people who just didn’t vote, and that’s all within like, basically, a two-mile radius.”
Turning Point plans to expand its program to more states in future elections. Its basic belief is that with the United States highly polarized, Republicans’ best bet is to turn out low-propensity, conservative-leaning voters, instead of battling Democrats over a shrinking slice of swing voters.
“When you look at a presidential, you’re effectively reliant upon the low-propensity voter,” Mr. Bowyer said. “From a presidential perspective, the low-propensity voter is the demand that we have to meet. And that’s not going to change, I don’t think, anytime soon unless the method and mode in the voting changes.”
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