Turning Point USA Isn't College Student Outreach; It's Elderly Republican Donor Recruitment
See also: GOP minority voter outreach
Most media reporting uncritically accepts that Turning Point USA is about trying to convince young people to vote for Republicans by making conservatism cool. On a surface level, this makes sense: that is the stated aim of the group.
On a deeper level, that’s not really what they’re doing — or if it is, they’re very bad at it. TPUSA is best understood as a convenient way to convince old people that the Republican Party is still hip with the youths.
The majority of the GOP’s large donors are old people. Many of them see the world changing around them and are increasingly worried about being left behind.1 Crucially, most of these donors are worried about losing the fight for the future — they want to believe that the Republican party can win over young voters. They want to be told that the Republican party can be cool and hip and fleek.
If you have lots of rich people who are all worried about a specific problem, it’s only a matter of time before someone notices the opportunity. Enter Turning Point USA.
In case you think I’m being ungenerous to TPUSA, here is how Charlie Kirk himself described the group's fundraising strategy in 2018:
“You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses. You pair that nuttiness up with people in their 60s and 70s who are beginning to map out where they want a significant portion of their wealth to go, and they’re saying, ‘I don’t want my money to go to my university. It’s not representing my values.’ Then we come along.”
Turning college students into Republicans is difficult work. You would expect slow progress even when done by an organization not known for financial mismanagement and grift. But the tactics that TPUSA uses are not designed to persuade voters on college campuses, they are designed to create viral moments to reassure outside observers:
The classic TPUSA college campus interaction is a leader like Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens taking a question from a combative audience member, and responding with smug hostility. The back and forth is then clipped for social with a caption like “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS hysterical leftist on campus.” This is plainly not intended to persuade the student he is speaking to and is unlikely to be persuasive to genuinely undecided or apathetic students. But, it does a great job of letting folks who aren’t in college anymore know that college leftists are dumb. It’s using the unpersuasive interactions on college campuses to go viral off-campus and reach conservative voters elsewhere.
A subgenre of this is inviting a deeply controversial speaker like Milo Yiannopolos to campus solely to create backlash which draws media attention. The median college student disagrees with Milo Yiannopolos on most issues and is unlikely to find him persuasive. Frankly, I suspect the median campus conservative finds him faintly embarrassing, though they wouldn’t admit it publicly. But the events effectively polarize communities and inspire liberal protests, which help drive the narrative of liberal intolerance, which reminds donors — who are already primed to suspect the worst of college campuses — how important TPUSA’s work is.
TPUSA produces a Professor Watchlist of ‘leftist’ academics. I’m not really sure how this is supposed to persuade college students to become Republicans, but it has been very useful for driving Fox News stories.
Politico describes TPUSA’s efforts to win student body elections as “one of its main promises to donors” and you can see why donors like the idea. But at many campuses, once TPUSA’s involvement was exposed by student newspapers, the candidate dropped out. Further, when Politico reached out to seven candidates that TPUSA claimed to have helped win, “all denied they had worked with Turning Point USA on their campaigns. Two said they had been contacted by the group, but the others said they’d never dealt with anyone from Turning Point USA, nor had they accepted any money or other support. Several went further and spoke against the organization.”
Huge chunks of TPUSA’s money are spent on lavish conferences for college kids. These retreats produce great content online, but are an expensive way to preach to the choir. No one undecided is jetting off for a weekend to hear serial plagiarist Benny Johnson riff about the free market.
None of these tactics are particularly effective at moving undecided or politically unengaged college students to the right. But lots of them help create eye-catching moments which are great for satisfying donors.
I think this theory can also be extended to some — but not all — of the GOP’s minority voter outreach efforts under Trump. It’s certainly true that there are Republicans who earnestly want to win votes from people of color, and that sometimes they make efforts to do so. But it’s also true that the biggest electoral bleed that the GOP has faced under Trump has been middle to upper middle class suburbanites who don’t like the fact that Trump is obviously a racist.
There’s a ton of people who don’t want to be in The Party of Racism and left the GOP over it. Minority voter outreach from the GOP serves two goals: maybe it wins a couple votes from people of color on the margins, but definitely it helps reassure skittish white moderates that the GOP isn’t The Party of Racism.
If GOP minority outreach is mostly about winning votes, we would expect their year round minority voter centers to stay open year round and do the hard work of organizing. But if GOP minority outreach is mostly about reassuring white moderates, we would expect them to be massively hyped in the press but then forgotten about after a few news cycles. Let’s check in on how the minority voter outreach centers are doing:
Georgia: “Shuttered GOP outreach center now home to shop selling sex toys” [Atlanta Journal Constitution, 4/10/24]
Nevada: “The GOP’s former centers for minority voters in Nevada have been quietly closed and replaced by a church, and vape and boba shops…community center locations remain listed on an active page on the Nevada GOP’s website [which] does not note the closure of the centers.” [The Nevada Independent, 4/9/24]
Texas: “RNC scales back Hispanic outreach in South Texas, once a source of GOP bragging rights” [San Antonio Record, 4/5/24]
Wisconsin: “RNC's former Hispanic outreach center in Milwaukee soon to become an ice cream shop” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, 3/28/24]
All of these offices were billed as year round organizing efforts which would last beyond a single cycle. All were shut down quietly without fanfare shortly after the midterms. The only reason we’re hearing about it now is because the RNC leadership changed, and the story got dredged up as part of news about RNC layoffs — even though most of the minority outreach centers shuttered months or years ago.
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This is hardly unique to Republicans. Similar trends motivate the incredible proliferation of stories about wokeness on college campuses, whose target readership is older college educated people that are worried about societal change.