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 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, 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 Kamala 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.
But then he made a subtler point, stressing that it’s not actually Trump whom conservatives are voting for but the 5,000 political appointees he’ll sweep into office behind him. “Those 5,000 people matter a lot more than whether or not, well, ‘I don’t like Trump because he’s not very nice,’” said Kirk.
In this citadel of MAGA spirituality — the ex-president himself spoke there at a Turning Point event in June — I’d expected to hear Trump praised in exalted terms, not justified as the lesser of two evils. But Carson argued that, unless Jesus Christ himself is on the ballot, the lesser evil is the choice in every election. “There are certain individuals that some people just detest because they don’t like their tweets and things like that,” said Carson. He asked, “But do you hate that person more than you love your children and your grandchildren?”
The Harris campaign’s outreach to Republicans has created a fair bit of angst among some progressives. At their convention, Democrats refused activist entreaties to allow a Palestinian to speak, even as they highlighted Republicans backing Harris such as former Representative Adam Kinzinger and John Giles, mayor of Mesa, Ariz. Harris’s campaign has touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney, archvillain of the George W. Bush era. It’s made the strict border bill co-written by the Oklahoma Republican senator James Lankford the center of its messaging on immigration. In Arizona last week, Harris announced plans to create a bipartisan council of advisers, saying, “We have to have a healthy two-party system.”
“Gone today is that desire to broaden the horizon of political possibility — less ‘unburdened by what has been,’ to borrow another of the vice president’s mantras, than stubbornly chained to it,” lamented New York magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice.
There are reasons to be skeptical of this approach. In 2016, Democrats hoped that Trump’s evident indecency would spur a significant number of Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” predicted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York. It didn’t work out that way. By trying to represent normality and stability, the Democratic Party threatens to become the party of the status quo in a country where the status quo feels increasingly untenable.
But on the ground in Arizona, it’s clear why Harris thinks she can garner a potentially meaningful number of Republican votes. The dynamic Schumer identified in 2016 was real; it just wasn’t far enough along to save Clinton. During the Trump years, as Republicans have improved their margins with working-class voters, Democrats have made gains with educated suburbanites and, more broadly, with those who fundamentally trust American civic institutions. This realignment is remaking politics in states including Georgia, which is now a swing state, and Ohio, which used to be one but isn’t anymore. But perhaps no place has undergone a partisan revolution quite like Arizona’s.
Until recently, the Republican Party dominated Arizona, the home of Barry Goldwater, whose failed 1964 presidential run helped birth contemporary conservatism. From 1952 to 2016, Arizona voted Republican in every presidential election but one. When Trump took office, it had two Republican senators, John McCain, a towering figure and former presidential candidate, and the ultraconservative Jeff Flake, who had been the executive director of the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank in Phoenix. The former Republican governor Doug Ducey, who served until 2023, won his 2018 re-election by more than 14 points.
Today things look very different. Arizona voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit by the smallest margin of any state, fewer than 11,000 votes. The state has one Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, and one Democrat-turned-independent, Kyrsten Sinema, who is likely to be replaced by a Democrat, Representative Ruben Gallego. The governor and the attorney general are both Democrats. Republicans maintain a one-seat majority in both houses of the legislature, but Democrats could flip them both in this election. And the 2024 presidential race is in a dead heat.
Democratic Party organizers surely deserve some of the credit for Arizona’s transformation. Demographic change has also played a role; Arizona is a fast-growing state with hundreds of thousands of new people moving there each year. But Arizona’s G.O.P. wouldn’t have lost its unilateral grip on the state without Trump and his acolytes.
Speaking in his office in Mesa, Arizona’s third-largest city, Giles told me he’s been active in the Arizona Republican Party for his entire adult life. “There was always a strong right-wing element to the Republican Party, kind of the John Birch wing of the party,” he said, referring to the John Birch Society, a far-right, conspiracy-ridden anti-Communist organization. “I never felt particularly comfortable with those folks, but the Republican Party was a big tent, and you could be a John McCain-style Republican and feel at home in the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case.”
The extremism of the current Arizona G.O.P. is hard to overstate. Kelli Ward, a former state party chair, was indicted in April along with 17 others over her efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and the conviction that the election was stolen pervades the party at every level. In 2022, Republicans nominated Mark Finchem, a onetime member of the Oath Keepers militia, to be secretary of state. Now running for State Senate, he recently retweeted a QAnon video accusing the Rothschild banking family of engineering the Civil War. Rusty Bowers, the very conservative former speaker of the Arizona House, has been driven out of Republican politics for refusing to go along with the “stop the steal” movement. He lost his last primary to David Farnsworth, a businessman who described the 2020 election as “a real conspiracy headed up by the devil himself.”
Turning Point, which moved its headquarters to Phoenix in 2018, is fully committed to the notion that Biden’s victory was illegitimate, and it’s been effective in enforcing ideological discipline in Arizona. “They have a bigger impact than any other Republican group I know,” the Trump operative Jeff DeWit told The Washington Post in 2022, describing Turning Point as more powerful than the Republican National Committee.
Election conspiracy theories nullify any incentive for the party to moderate after its losses, since defeat only demonstrates the monstrous scale of the plot arrayed against it. But on some level, even Kirk must know that the Republican Party in Arizona has contracted, a process he’s played an essential role in.
It was Turning Point, after all, that turbocharged the political campaign of Kari Lake, the extraordinarily unpopular Republican Senate candidate. In 2021, Lake, a former local TV anchor, was running a long-shot race for the Republican gubernatorial primary when she impressed Trump at a Turning Point event in Phoenix. His fulsome endorsement helped catapult her to victory in a crowded primary. As The Post reported, she staffed her campaign with former Turning Point employees.
Lake mimicked Trump’s well-known antipathy to McCain, which probably endeared her to the former president; at one point she was seen as a possible Trump running mate. But building a political identity around contempt for McCain’s wing of the party was an odd choice in a state where he’s still widely revered. “We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” she boasted at a Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022. At a rally shortly before that year’s election, she asked, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!”
Many of them did. “Two years ago, you had Kari Lake literally telling people like me to get the hell out of the party,” said Giles. “So they’ve been successful, you know, in rooting out people that don’t align with a MAGA point of view.”
Giles is just one of several old-guard Republicans in Arizona who have endorsed Harris. Flake came out for her in September. Bettina Nava, McCain’s former Arizona state director, told me that everyone she knows from McCain’s operation is a Harris supporter. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, she said, “don’t necessarily represent the Democratic Party. They just represent a path for possibility, because I think they have reached across the aisle.” Following Trump’s campaign stunt in Arlington National Cemetery in August, McCain’s youngest son, Jim McCain, both endorsed Harris and registered as a Democrat.
After Giles’s Democratic convention speech, he was prepared for abuse from MAGA die-hards, and he got it. Mesa, after all, is a very conservative area; one of its congressmen is Andy Biggs, who was actively involved in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But what surprised Giles were all the people in his right-leaning community who approached him in restaurants and grocery stores to thank him. Some of them were Democrats and independents, but there were Republicans as well. “The negative reaction was expected and predictable,” he said. “The positive reaction was more than I expected.”
The Harris campaign clearly sees an opportunity in Arizona. Last Wednesday, the day early voting began, Walz campaigned there with Jim McCain and Representative Gallego, Lake’s opponent. Seven thousand people attended a Harris rally in Chandler, outside Phoenix, on Thursday. Jill Biden visited, as did a bevy of pro-Harris celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close and Jessica Alba. Barack Obama is headed there this week.
Democrats are hoping that a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution will help drive turnout. “Arizona, we need to fight this battle on every front,” Harris said on Thursday. “And in this election, you have the chance on the state level to vote yes on Proposition 139 and protect your right to make your own health care decisions.”
But while Proposition 139 is expected to pass handily, the vice president still faces strong headwinds. Many of the problems that have soured some voters on Biden’s administration are particularly acute in Arizona. At one point in 2022, the Phoenix metro area had the highest inflation rate in America, driven in part by an explosion in housing prices during the pandemic, though it’s since cooled off significantly. Arizona is a border state where many voters are deeply upset about illegal immigration; a ballot measure giving the state and local police authority to arrest undocumented immigrants is widely expected to pass.
Republicans still lead the state in voter registration, followed by independents. Democrats are just 29 percent of the state’s voters. “Look, the economy in Arizona does not favor Democrats, and Arizona is a conservative state,” said the Republican strategist Barrett Marson. “We’re just not a Trump state.” As Marson noted, even when Trump won Arizona in 2016, he did so with less than 50 percent of the vote. More than 7 percent of the vote that year went to third parties, led by the Libertarians. “Nikki Haley, if she were atop the ticket, this wouldn’t be a competitive state,” he said.
Even if Trump wins Arizona in November, the damage he’s done to the state’s Republican Party could keep its candidates on the ropes for the foreseeable future. The party’s MAGA-fueled erosion is perhaps most visible in the pitiful state of Lake’s campaign. Observers have started comparing her to Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. The analogy feels a little unfair, given that Lake has never, at least to my knowledge, called herself a Nazi, expressed a wish to own slaves or fantasized about committing obscene acts with an in-law in the comments section of a porn site. But it gets at the depth of Lake’s reputational collapse.
Recently, Emerson College released side-by-side surveys of Arizona and North Carolina. In Arizona it found Trump leading Harris by three percentage points, 50 to 47, but Gallego ahead by 11 points. As Emerson pointed out, 10 percent of Trump voters in Arizona said they’re supporting Gallego, comparable to the 12 percent of Trump voters who are supporting the Democratic candidate for governor in North Carolina, Josh Stein, over Robinson.
Other polls show Arizona’s Senate race tighter, but Gallego is ahead in almost all of them. In some ways, it’s hard to understand why Arizonans appear to dislike Lake so much more than they do Trump, since she’s worked so hard to fashion herself in his image. Misogyny surely plays a role, as does the distinct appeal that Gallego, a Latino Marine veteran, has to other Latino men.
Then there’s the fact that Lake made Republican enemies in a reality-TV-style feud with DeWit, the former Trump staff member who became chair of the state party in 2023. Seeing Lake as unelectable, he offered her a lucrative job in exchange for stepping aside. She was recording the conversation, and after it leaked, DeWit had to resign. “I liken it to an unsanctioned mob hit against a Trump insider,” said Marson.
But ultimately, Republicans are probably going to lose the Arizona Senate race for the same reason they lost it in 2022, when they nominated the MAGA venture capitalist and gun fetishist Blake Masters, or the Georgia Senate race that year, when they chose the accused domestic abuser Herschel Walker. Trump, who cares only for praise and fealty, has a natural affinity for grifters and fanatics. He elevates figures who share many of his faults but not his Mephistophelean charisma.
I kept asking people if they thought there would be a reckoning among Arizona Republicans if Trump lost. Few said yes.
“There’s part of me that is pessimistic, that thinks that the Republican Party might be a lost cause,” said Giles. He wonders if a new conservative party could emerge. “Maybe we have three parties for a while in our country. But we need to have more than one strong party, and we don’t have that now,” he said.
We still don’t know how Trump’s reshuffling of our political coalitions is going to shake out. Right now, though, Harris sees an opportunity, and she’s trying to seize it.
The post How Trump Broke Arizona’s Republican Party appeared first on New York Times.
