Without Charlie Kirk, Turning Point is building a future for his movement — and for JD Vance

Charlie Kirk sat before a Salt Lake City audience of restaurateurs last September 10, dispensing business advice drawn from his own unlikely rise. The conservative activist argued that a company needed a deep connection to the founder’s “energy and vision” to endure, but he also warned that “separating the brand from the founder” was among the greatest challenges an entrepreneur could face. “We have not done this successfully yet,” Kirk acknowledged of Turning Point USA, the organization he built to influence and mobilize young people. Hours later, a gunman fatally shot Kirk on a Utah college campus. He was 31. In the year since his death, Turning Point’s leaders — including Kirk’s widow, Erika, and some of his closest friends and lieutenants — have confronted the very challenge he described that tragic morning: preserving and expanding a political movement that had been built, to an extraordinary degree, around the energy, instincts and celebrity of its charismatic leader. They have done so amid remarkable circumstances, including the criminal case against Kirk’s alleged killer; conservative influencers warring over his legacy; and far-right figures, led by former Turning Point employee Candace Owens, spreading baseless conspiracy theories about his death. The 2026 midterm elections present the biggest test yet of the question hanging over the organization: What is Turning Point without Charlie Kirk? “There is a void, and lots of people are trying to fill it,” Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters told CNN, “but no one will be able to do what he did.” By some measures, the answer is a larger organization than the one Kirk left behind. About 1,500 colleges have Turning Point chapters on campus, up 64% over the past year, according to an internal document obtained by CNN, and affiliated high school clubs have nearly tripled. Turning Point now says it has over 1 million donors and more than 1,200 employees. Its political operation is expanding, too. Turning Point staff and volunteers are embedded in more states with contests critical to Republican power in 2026 — and the presidential race two years later. The stakes extend to the political ambitions of Vice President JD Vance, a close Kirk friend whom the organization has already endorsed for president in 2028. Whether the organization can sustain Kirk’s movement — and mobilize the voters he spent years courting — could help determine whether the vice president can inherit the political coalition Donald Trump assembled. “If you believe in JD that much, that’s even more motivation to work our butts off and throw the kitchen sink at this thing,” said Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action. “We’re going to do everything we possibly can to win (in 2026) because so much is at stake — in this case, getting JD to run.” Turning Point’s own effectiveness, though, has come under scrutiny in its home state, Arizona, where some Republicans fault the polarizing organization for the party’s recent electoral defeats. This year, the group has put its muscle behind Rep. Andy Biggs, a conservative Trump ally whose candidacy for governor has revived anxieties about hard-right nominees who narrowly lost statewide races. Meanwhile, the political coalition Turning Point helped build faces new strains largely beyond the organization’s control. Polls show that young voters, whose sharp shift toward Trump in 2024 further elevated Kirk’s stature within the party, have soured on the president. Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet acknowledged the movement is facing headwinds, “and that’s especially true among young voters.” “They are telling us they are worried about housing, affordability, foreign policy, etc.,” Kolvet said. “But if anyone has the political talent and ability to address their needs, wants and concerns directly ahead of the midterms, it’s President Trump and JD Vance.” Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at age 18. What began as a nonprofit for young conservatives eventually grew into a sprawling, multimillion-dollar network that touched all aspects of American politics, including faith, culture, schools, voter registration, candidate endorsements and campaign fundraising. But Turning Point also served as a massive platform for Kirk himself. His podcast and viral confrontations with liberals on college campuses made him one of the right’s most visible personalities, while his relationships across the movement bridged some of the divides within Trump’s MAGA coalition. That part of Turning Point has proved difficult to replace. Clips from Kirk’s podcast, now hosted by Kolvet, rarely draw the YouTube audiences they once did. Others have tried, with mixed success, to re-create the virality of his campus debates. And the right-wing online ecosystem where Kirk served as connective tissue between competing factions has frayed during Trump’s second term. Turning Point’s leaders privately acknowledge there is no replacing Kirk, who will be honored one year after his death at Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas on Thursday. Instead, they have focused on what they can preserve and expand: the organization he built around himself. “Yes, we don’t have Charlie’s social media anymore, which is a big loss. And we don’t have his voice — huge deal,” a person involved in the organization told CNN. “But the actual machinery of Turning Point has never been bigger.” As evidence, they pointed to a recent training for 150 new staffers. Online job boards show dozens of openings to work for Turning Point in battleground states. “We’re going to be even bigger this election than we were in 2024,” Bowyer said. Political memorabilia adorns the shelves of Bowyer’s office — a Calvin Coolidge pendant, a bust of Teddy Roosevelt, and a framed print of Newsweek’s never-published 2016 “Madam President” cover of Hillary Clinton next to Time’s cover featuring Trump as Person of the Year. Among them is a painting of Kirk, whose face is inescapable throughout Turning Point’s Arizona campus. There, Bowyer oversees the organization’s voter turnout machine — the “pinnacle” of Kirk’s legacy, as he described it. “It’s kind of like the Super Bowl,” Bowyer said. “It’s pointless to educate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people, for them just to go, ‘Oh, you know, don’t use that.’ Right?” He added, “Charlie really believes in that,” slipping into present tense to describe his deceased friend and former leader — not for the only time during a 90-minute interview with CNN. Bowyer is now expanding a program piloted in the 2024 election. Then, the group embedded staff and volunteers in neighborhoods throughout Arizona to mobilize potential Republican voters. Rather than send canvassers to knock on as many doors as possible, Turning Point instructed its organizers to make genuine connections, build relationships, show up at local events and, at least initially, avoid talking politics. It’s a strategy built around quality, not quantity, Bowyer argues. By Election Day, organizers are expected to have a plan for getting their assigned households — about 600 to 1,000 people — to the polls or to vote by mail. “Ballot chasers” are tasked with ensuring they follow through. Each organizer’s goal is to turn out about half their designated voters — a much higher threshold than traditional canvassers. The effectiveness of the operation is difficult to measure, and there are Republican skeptics, including within Trump’s own political operation. But Turning Point emerged from 2024 with a compelling result to point to: Trump won Arizona by 5.5 percentage points, his largest victory of all the battleground states. The victory emboldened Turning Point to double down in 2026. Even before the midterm map had fully taken shape, the organization was deploying staff and hiring in key battleground states. Maps of those states line the walls inside Turning Point Action’s headquarters with heat maps of voters and detailed breakdowns on “chaseable votes.” This spring, the operation had a dry run when it joined the White House’s retribution campaign against Republican lawmakers in Indiana who resisted Trump’s calls to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries. Trump-backed challengers defeated seven of the eight GOP holdouts. Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Trump ally, said Turning Point mobilized quickly despite little history in his state and noted the group left behind manpower for future political battles. “The proof is in the pudding. Critics could say, ‘This is the first year. What good are they going to do?’” Beckwith said. “I don’t know how you break down the pie chart of who deserves credit, but we won and won in a big way.” Republican operatives in key states say Turning Point is already making its presence felt. Former New Hampshire GOP Chairman Chris Ager said the group arrived on the ground far earlier than usual for a grassroots organization, hired experienced local activists and their visibility has been “extremely high.” Jason Roe, a veteran Michigan strategist, said Turning Point’s organizers have been more “engaged and impactful” than the college-age men and women he typically encounters in groups for young Republican. “Turning Point is made up of true believers,” Roe said. “They’re griding because they care, not because it’s the first step on a journey to getting involved in politics.” In Iowa, Turning Point’s growing influence has already been tested against the most powerful endorsement in Republican politics. The organization supported businessman and farmer Zach Lahn in the state’s closely watched Republican primary for governor. Trump backed Rep. Randy Feenstra. Lahn won. “We were so busy talking about the Trump endorsement,” said Jeff Angelo, a prominent conservative radio host in Iowa, “that we missed the most important endorsement: Turning Point Action.” No one needs less convincing of Turning Point’s sway with GOP voters than Julie Spilsbury. Last year, Bowyer made it his stated mission to oust Spilsbury, a registered Republican who supported Kamala Harris for president over Trump, from the City Council in Mesa, where he resides. Turning Point helped lead an effort to recall her, and in December 2025, Spilsbury lost the seat she had held for five years by about 700 votes. “It was devastating and heartbreaking and made a lot of people mad,” she said. Spilsbury considers herself a casualty of Turning Point’s growing clout in the Arizona GOP — and what she and others described as its vindictive approach to intraparty politics. The organization has aggressively intervened in primaries and endorsed dozens of candidates, stacking up wins and bruising fellow Republicans along the way. The clashes have become increasingly public. Bowyer faced blowback in July after he questioned on X whether Arizona state Rep. Quang Nguyen, a Republican who escaped communist Vietnam as a child, can speak English. When Republican state Rep. Nick Kupper came to Nguyen’s defense, Bowyer threatened to back a challenger against Kupper in 2028 and later announced Turning Point was withdrawing its endorsement. Reached by CNN via email, Kupper declined to revisit the episode. Attempts to reach Nguyen through his office were unsuccessful. Such tactics might go overlooked by Republicans in the Trump era if Turning Point was consistently turning its primary success into general election wins. In Arizona, it has not. The organization played a key role in the unsuccessful 2022 campaigns of Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters. Lake lost a Senate race two years later. A Turning Point official noted the organization didn’t endorse Lake in her primaries but jumped in to help after she became the GOP nominee. Still, Bowyer contended they were “on the path for Kari to win” in 2022. The lesson from the loss, he argued, was that the organization needed more manpower. “If we would have kept going and chased more votes, I think we could have won,” he said. Lake lost the governor’s race by roughly 17,000 votes. The defeats have spread to far smaller Arizona contests. Earlier this year, Turning Point jumped into races for the Salt River Project, a local utility board whose elections typically draw little public attention. The group’s involvement drove a surge in turnout from both sides, but clean-energy candidates ultimately won a majority of seats for the first time in recent memory. The Turning Point official argued that the group secured the two most critical positions leading the board “amid national headwinds that have impacted local races.” But progressives claimed victory after the election, and even local Republicans have acknowledged the board’s leftward turn was a significant setback. “I think (Turning Point) is bombing hard, and it’s excellent for everyone else. I hesitate to say too much because we don’t want them to stop,” said Autumn Johnson, executive director of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association. “They have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, and they don’t know they don’t know what they’re doing. And it turns out a lot of people hate them.” Their presence is causing divisions within the GOP at a time when the party is losing power across the state, argued Nick Myers, a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, a state utility board. A Turning Point-backed challenger defeated Myers in a primary earlier this year. He said he lost the organization’s support after a back-and-forth on X with Bowyer a few years ago. “As soon as they started getting involved, Republicans started losing,” Myers said. “It’s not because we’re becoming a purple state. Voters can’t stand the candidates Turning Point is nominating. Their days are limited if they don’t start putting up candidates who can win.” The organization is betting on Biggs, the gubernatorial nominee, to reverse the party’s recent fortunes. The Turning Point official noted that Biggs was one of Kirk’s final and most passionate endorsements, viewing him as “a transformational and generational leader for Arizona — somebody who could turn Arizona into the Florida of the West.” Bowyer said Biggs is a more seasoned politician than his predecessors and is better positioned to take on Katie Hobbs, the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic governor this year. Turning Point is now more experienced in campaign work, too, he added. Some Republicans in Arizona view the race as a referendum on Turning Point as much as Biggs. Barrett Marson, a longtime GOP operative in Arizona, said if Biggs wins, many Republicans expect Turning Point to effectively take over the state GOP. A loss, though, would have its own consequences. “Turning Point is all in on two people: Andy Biggs and JD Vance,” Marson said. “If both of those guys lose their upcoming elections, I predict they won’t be around much after 2028.” Turning Point recently doubled its staff in Iowa and is rapidly deploying organizers in New Hampshire ahead of key midterm races in both states. When the elections are over, the teams will remain — and wait for Vance to make a decision. Erika Kirk sent one of the first shockwaves through the 2028 presidential race in December when she endorsed Vance — getting ahead not only of the vice president, but of Trump, who is widely expected to play a decisive role in choosing his successor. Since then, Turning Point has set out to demonstrate that a turnkey organization will be waiting for Vance if he launches a White House bid. Ager, the former New Hampshire party chairman, said Turning Point could present a “significant organizational advantage out of the gate” for Vance in 2028 when Republicans there vote in the GOP’s first presidential primary. Iowa, meanwhile, will hold the party’s first nominating contest. “It’s still up to the candidate to convince voters,” he said. “But a good organization absolutely helps.” Vance has remained close to Turning Point, appearing at several events and guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast. The mutual loyalty is “downstream of the genuine close friendship that JD had with Charlie,” a source close to the vice president told CNN. Kirk helped propel Vance within the party and into his current role. Though he remains reticent to publicly discuss his political future, Vance privately views Turning Point’s support as a key to his future ambitions, the source said. The organization offers Vance a connection to “America First” stalwarts in Trump’s coalition and a well-funded political infrastructure separate from the president’s political operation. “They are specifically a MAGA power center, versus a traditional power center,” the source said. “They are distinctly different from the old guard establishment that wouldn’t necessarily support JD, and that serves as a true home for the MAGA voters.” Bowyer said he expects Vance to closely watch the midterm results before he finalizes his plans. But he added, “If people want you to run, and you decide not to run, you usually don’t ever get a chance to run again.” For Turning Point, delivering Republican victories this fall, particularly in Arizona, would give Vance reason to trust the organization Kirk left behind could help carry him to the White House. Failure would bring its own reckoning, and Bowyer said Turning Point would judge itself more harshly than any outside critic if the group fell short. Said Bowyer: “Charlie felt that way.” CNN’s Alayna Treene contributed to this report.