The GOP grassroots asserts its will
The coup is coming from inside the house:
Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old activist who leads Turning Point USA and a network of conservative affiliates, wrote with a warning.
In a Monday email to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, he told them that donors and activists would desert the party unless it changed. The result, he said, would be colossal failure in the 2024 presidential election.
“How do we plan to win in 2024 if you so boldly reject listening to the grassroots, our donors, and the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement?” he asked in the message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If ignored, we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”
The extraordinary message came in the midst of a bitter GOP leadership contest, with incumbent RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel seeking to beat back a challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney and committee member from California who has been paid for legal consulting by former president Donald Trump’s political action committee, among numerous clients. Kirk and his allies have vigorously promoted Dhillon, hosting her on variousmedia platforms and staging a straw poll at a recent Turning Point summit in Phoenix.
The email also deepened an internal GOP feud over the party’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterms, with competing factions blaming one another for why Republicans in key races came up short.
Above all, the message showed how Kirk is squaring off with the GOP establishment. He is marshaling his well-resourced network of nonprofit groups, which gained popularity over the past six years with Trump’s backing but demonstrated mixed results in races last month. Many of Kirk’s endorsed candidates lost, foremost among them Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona. Dhillon served as an attorney for Lake’s campaign, traveling to Phoenix for the election.
Kirk alerted the RNC members to a new initiative of his group’s political arm, Turning Point Action, that would seek to pick off RNC members deemed “disconnected with grassroot conservatives.”
He said the effort, called the Mount Vernon Project, will “recruit leaders to serve on the RNC and at the state level who wish to better represent the grassroots voice.”
The initiative, which was previously reported by Politico, is “funded graciously by donors who are vocally disenchanted” with the RNC’s members, Kirk wrote.
The project brings to the national stage a model of bare-knuckled politicking used by Turning Point in its home state of Arizona, where it hasworked to purge GOP officials who stood in the way of Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election. Now, the focus is on the race for GOP chair, with Kirk saying at his group’s weekend summit in Phoenix: “Turning Point Action might remove members of the RNC if they vote incorrectly.”
There is not enough popcorn in the world to get me through this drama. It is wildly entertaining. It’s also terrifying. That this 29 year old miscreant could actually have any power in one of the two parties that govern the most powerful nation on earth. You’d like to think he’s just a fringe figure, but he isn’t. He does have a lot of influence with the base. And Republicans know it.
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