bowyer, tyler tpusa

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merri ok

FAKE ELECTOR

cleta

indict

gohmert big lie trump coup

grift?

TPUSA HAS HIJACKED AZ STATE GOP?

ANTIFA WEAPONIZ CHIP ROY 12 25

FUENTES

beat on salt river 4 26

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an 4 26

Critics say Erika Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has gone toxic in red-state Arizona, possibly to the point of derailing races it sticks its nose in.

“Turning Point USA has been blamed by a senior Arizona Democrat after conservative‑backed candidates fell short in a closely watched election for control of the Salt River Project (SRP) board, which oversees the state’s largest public utility,” reports Newsweek.

The races involve the critical Salt River Project board, which makes decisions over access and pricing for resources, and it sets the economic structure of the state and some of its neighbors. But Newsweek reports Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos saying the conservative activist group’s heavy involvement in the race mobilized opposition voters and gave his own party an unintended boost toward clean‑energy aligned candidates.

“TPUSA pumped an unprecedented amount of money into this election,” De Los Santos wrote on X. “Voters came out in droves against TPUSA. Turnout was more than 400 percent of 2024 turnout.”

Turning Point USA worked arm-in-arm with the brand of President Donald Trump, at least until TPUSA factions began opposing Trump’s invasion of Iran. But the two appear to still smell enough alike to make a vote against one a vote against both.

“Leadership elections for the Salt River Project are usually sleepy affairs, but this year’s races were unusually high-profile,” reported the Phoenix New Times. “That’s because Turning Point Action, the political arm of the Charlie Kirk-founded Turning Point USA, decided to flex its financial and organizational might in the battle to control the massive public utility, which serves 2 million customers throughout much of the East Valley. Turning Point spent gobs of money advertising for a pro-industry slate of candidates and even sent an army of employees and volunteers to harvest ballots — a legal practice in SRP elections — in hopes of fending off a progressive slate called the Clean Energy Team.”

“For all that effort, Turning Point’s toxic brand may have worked against it,” the Times said.

The Clean Energy Team flipped two seats on the 14-member district board, shifting control of the body to clean-energy-friendly board members more open to renewable energy investment and more skeptical of fossil fuels and data centers. But team also “gained several seats on the district’s 30-member advisory council,” said The Times. “In fact, in 13 head-to-head races for district leadership — including races for president and vice president — Clean Energy Team candidates won 11 of the matchups.”

re

hugh c

Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has been blamed by a senior Arizona Democrat after conservative‑backed candidates fell short in a closely watched election for control of the Salt River Project (SRP) board, which oversees the state’s largest public utility.

Newsweek has contacted Turning Point Action, TPUSA's advocacy and campaign arm, through its website for comment.

Why It Matters

The SRP is one of the most critical water and power systems in the Southwest, providing water to hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland as well as electricity to millions of residents. The composition of its board therefore shapes decisions over access and pricing for these resources, while also influencing the state’s economic structure and that of the wider region.

What To Know

Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos said the conservative activist group’s heavy involvement in the race mobilized opposition voters and helped tip the balance toward clean‑energy aligned candidates.

“TPUSA pumped an unprecedented amount of money into this election,” De Los Santos wrote on X. “Voters came out in droves against TPUSA. Turnout was more than 400 percent of 2024 turnout.”

^Read ^More

News

[

Charlie Kirk Ally Says He’d Back Trump Impeachment Under This Circumstance](https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-ally-trump-impeachment-andrew-kolvet-11799764)

Elections were held this week for control of the SRP board, pitting a group of conservative-backed candidates against clean-energy advocates.

According to unofficial results published on the SRP website, several TPUSA-backed candidates were successful, including President Chris Dobson and Vice President Barry Paceley. However, their opponents have secured an eight-to-six majority on the board, per reporting from The New York Times and The Arizona Republic.

Early voting for the utility board election began in March, with the race quickly shaping into a contest by between clean-energy candidates and those backed by Turning Point USA, the group founded by the late activist Charlie Kirk.

Turning Point Action chief operating officer Tyler Bowyer said that the race, and the group’s involvement, could set the stage for other upcoming elections in the state, telling E&E News: “The SRP territories, they’re pretty blue. If we can get turnout and activate the toughest place in the state for us right now, that could play a huge role for us later on in November.”

According to The Arizona Republic, citing a spokesperson for the SRP, around four times as many ballots were cast in this year’s race as in 2024.

And those on the clean-energy slate were able to make sizable gains, flipping a number of board seats—and taking control of the board—while securing victories in advisory council elections, doubling their representation from four to eight out of 30 seats, The Arizona Republicreported on Wednesday.

However, as well as the presidency and vice presidency, traditional SRP candidates maintained control of the water board—results Turning Point celebrated as denying clean-energy advocates full control of the project.

What People Are Saying

Arizona House Democratic Leader Oscar De Los Santos posted to X:“MONUMENTAL ELECTION EARTHQUAKE IN ARIZONA TONIGHT: Consumer advocates & clean energy candidates defeated Turning Point USA in a huge utility election and FLIPPED the majority of the utility board. SRP will be the largest utility in the country with a clean energy majority.”

“After the massive Democratic victories we’ve seen across the country, the blue wave has now hit Arizona,” he wrote in a separate post. “Just wait until November: TPUSA is going to get crushed at the ballot box. Mark my words.”

SRP vice president Barry Paceley told The Arizona Republic:“We will strive to keep the most affordable rates, highest reliability, and seek the most economic and clean energy generation. We are saddened that several of our highly qualified candidates were not elected who would've been instrumental in the future success of Salt River Project."

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rww

12/12/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

• Rep. Chip Roy says that Republicans in the House of Representatives will be holding hearings to expose how George Soros, NGOs, and the United Nations have been using the SPLC and antifa to promote "Marxists and Islamists who want to take this country over."

• "Prophet" Mark Taylor fumes that "Susie Wiles and her people are the ones responsible for single handedly KILLING the America First Agenda!": "She is a demonic infiltrator in the highest order sent in to destroy the President and the America First Agenda."

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ref

tony perkins

Rep. Chip Roy Highlights the latest on the Defense Bill & Looks Ahead to 2025 Agenda

0:00

And here we have Texas Congressman Chip

0:02

Roy who has joined us here in the media

0:06

center at the Family Research Council.

0:09

Uh a familiar face and voice on

0:11

Washington watch. Uh Congressman, thanks

0:13

so much for running off the hill and

0:15

coming down here and joining us.

:{:{...}:

about something. You are hosting or

4:06

actually you're chairing, I should say,

4:07

a subcommittee hearing next week. You

4:09

chaired the constitution committee in

4:12

the judiciary committee on the southern

4:14

poverty law center that has in fact when

4:18

you walk out the door of this room you

4:20

will see the bullet holes in the wall

4:21

that was inspired a gunman to come into

4:24

this building. Uh Congress is ready to

4:27

act on that. They're ready to move to

4:29

expose these this long-term relationship

4:32

that SPLC was had has had with

4:34

government agencies.

4:35

Well, I'm certainly ready to do that. I

4:37

think uh Congressman uh and chairman

4:39

Jordan uh rightly agreed that we should

4:42

have this hearing in the subcommittee on

4:43

the Constitution. And so we're going to

4:44

be doing this next week. Uh Tony will be

4:46

one of the witnesses. Uh uh Tyler Boyer

4:49

from TPUSA is going to be one of the

4:51

witnesses. Uh as well as an individual

4:54

who's pretty knowledgeable here in town,

4:55

a journalist named Tyler O'Neal about

4:57

all of the dot connecting of all the

4:59

money. Now, there's a lot to unpack

5:01

here, which we probably don't have

5:02

enough time to do in full, but the short

5:04

version is anybody who loves and is

5:06

familiar with with with F FRC knows what

5:09

Southern Poverty Law Center meant with

5:11

respect to the attack here over a decade

5:12

ago uh here in this building. Um, but

5:16

and now we've seen the connection to

5:18

what happened with Charlie and and the

5:20

extent to which your, you know,

5:21

crosshairs are put on you. Heck, my name

5:23

is now getting put in the crosshairs

5:25

because I'm daring to call out the

5:26

Islamification of America. So what we're

5:29

going to do in this hearing is expose

5:30

that, demonstrate what's actually

5:32

happening, but I want to take that a

5:34

step further so people understand the

5:35

vast array of networks that are funding

5:37

all of it. The Soros operation, uh,

5:40

Arabella, all of the groups and all of

5:42

the operatives that are involved, the

5:43

Islamification funding, the open borders

5:45

groups, the NOS's, the United Nations,

5:48

your taxpayer dollars, all of it coming

5:50

together in this vast network to have a

5:52

red green alliance where you've got the

5:54

Marxists and the Islamists who want to

5:56

take our country over. and it's all

5:58

related and SPLC is right at the center

6:00

of it. Antifa is at the center of it.

6:02

All of these groups need to be exposed

6:04

and we're going to be doing that next

6:05

week and we're just getting started and

6:06

I've had some great conversation with

6:08

Secretary Bessant with people in the

6:09

administration. Um I think there's a

6:11

hunger to go break this network down

6:14

because it's attacking our way of life.

6:15

Well, it's it's

6:18

finninging violence and it's and it's

6:20

it's leading to death. Yep.

6:22

And it's chilling our First Amendment

6:24

freedoms. Chip Roy, always great to see

6:26

you. Thanks so much for joining us. Look

6:27

forward to seeing you next week.

6:28

Absolutely.

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an 9 25

The Arizona Court of Appeals on Monday declined to take up Attorney General Kris Mayes’ appeal of a lower court’s decision to send the Arizona fake electors case back to a grand jury.

In the order, signed by Chief Judge Kent Cattani, the court said the decision was made based on the judges’ discretion.

In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people for their involvement in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Democrat Joe Biden won the state by around 10,000 votes.

All of the fake electors involved in the scheme were indicted, including Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA CEO.

But in May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers agreed with arguments from attorneys representing the fake electors that prosecutors had failed to disclose the full text of the Electoral Count Act to the members of the grand jury prior to the indictment. Myers ruled that Mayes would have to convene a new grand jury and share the text of the act in its entirety if she wanted to move forward with the case.

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Instead, Mayes appealed the decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Now that the appellate court has declined the case, Mayes’ next steps are either to petition the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the trial court’s decision or to take the case back to a grand jury.

In response to the Appeals Court’s decision, the Arizona Republican Party issued a statement reiterating a claim from many of the indicted that the case was politically motivated.

“Arizona families deserve an Attorney General who prosecutes criminals, not political opponents,” AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda said in the statement. “Five years later, Kris Mayes is still fixated on 2020 while violent crime, fentanyl trafficking, and border chaos threaten our communities every single day. This obsession is not justice — it’s politics.”

Also among the indicted were Kelli Ward, who led the AZGOP at the time, Gregory Safsten, who was the AZGOP’s executive director, and former Trump staffers and campaign members including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Christina Bobb.

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grift?

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10? 24

WASHINGTON (AP) — Turning Point’s representatives have made two things clear in meetings with state and local Republican leaders — Donald Trump has blessed their conservative organization to help lead his get-out-the-vote effort, and local party officials ought to use the group’s new voter mobilization app.

Both prospects terrify fellow Republicans.

Soaring to prominence after Trump’s unexpected 2016 win, Turning Point earned a reputation for hosting glitzy events, cultivating hard-right influencers and raising prodigious sums of money while enriching the group’s leaders. They’ve had far less success helping Republicans win, especially in their adopted home state of Arizona.

Now the organization has leveraged its ties to Trump to expand its influence in a way that could be potentially lucrative. Turning Point has sought to lead an effort to remake the GOP’s get-out-the-vote effort based on the theory that there are thousands of Trump supporters who rarely vote but could be persuaded to in this year’s election. And they are pitching their new mobile app as vital to this effort’s success.

The Associated Press obtained an unvarnished look at how Turning Point is promoting its strategy by obtaining several recordings of presentations made by its representatives to state and local Republican officials. In those presentations, Turning Point operatives honed in on churchgoers and hunters, citing statistics that purport to show how few of each group cast ballots in 2020. Their argument, which is questioned by critics, is if groups like Turning Point target such groups, Republicans will likely sweep the swing states for Trump, the recordings show.

The decision by Trump to rely on untested groups such as Turning Point could have sweeping implications for November’s election. Turning Point says it’s operating statewide in Arizona and Wisconsin, two must win states for Trump. It’s also working in two competitive House districts, one in Michigan and another in Nevada, that could also help tip the balance in the presidential race.

The difference of just a few thousand votes in battleground states could mean victory or defeat for candidates up and down the ballot. It’s also a risky move that dismisses independent voters, a small but significant portion of the electorate.

“Their strategy is bad. They know how to talk MAGA, they know how to message the base,” said Tyler Montague, a Republican strategist from Arizona and a longtime Turning Point critic, referring to the former president’s Make America Great Again movement. “But they literally don’t know what to say to a swing voter. They alienate these people.”

A Turning Point spokesman rebuffed such criticism, saying the group is performing an important role for conservative candidates. “We did this because we knew conservatives need” a way to identify and turn out voters, said spokesman Andrew Kolvet. He added that the effort reflects lessons Turning Point has learned from defeats Republicans suffered in Arizona in 2022 and elsewhere and how Democrats have embraced similar tactics.

From influencers to organizers

Turning Point was founded in suburban Chicago over a decade ago by Charlie Kirk, then a recent high school graduate, to nurture the next generation of conservatives. But as its leaders age out of the youth movement, the group’s brand of far-right politics hasn’t been very persuasive to Arizona’s general election voters, who rejected conservative candidates for statewide office in 2022, including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake.

Turning Point’s leaders showed a degree of introspection after those losses. Not only had they failed to mobilize GOP voters, but Kirk had also amplified Trump’s false claims that voting by mail was rife with fraud, putting Republicans at a strategic disadvantage by discouraging a convenient way to cast a ballot.

They reversed course for the 2024 election and launched a campaign to raise $108 million for a “ballot chasing” operation that would expand beyond Arizona to key presidential swing states, where they are canvasing reliably Republican areas and encouraging low-turnout voters to cast a ballot by mail. Kolvet, Turning Point’s spokesman, said they have so far raised tens of millions of dollars as part of this effort.

Turning Point’s get-out-the-vote work is part of a broader effort to elect Trump that includes 30,000 volunteers recruited by the former president’s campaign, as well as work being done by such outside groups as Elon Musk’s America PAC, which has paid at least $45 million to voter canvasing firms this year.

Musk’s PAC took over as the leader of voter mobilization efforts in Wisconsin, a position that Turning Point had previously held. Turning Point will now play a secondary role in the state, while directing much of their focus to Arizona, a development previously reported by Politico.

A straightforward, if questionable, strategy

The group’s strategy isn’t complicated: Its operatives believe there is a well of untapped conservative voters who have not backed Trump in recent elections. To get Trump back to the White House, they believe the best path is to activate those voters. The strategy appears to mostly ignore independents — or less hardened Republicans — because Turning Point’s brand of hard-right politics is less likely to appeal to them.

In the recordings obtained by the AP, Turning Point’s representatives fully embraced that strategy and believe it would have helped them win past elections and ensure victory in November.

“If we just have an ounce of ballot chasing, just in Arizona,” Republicans would have won all their races, Matthew Martinez, a Turning Point official, said at a June event in Detroit, referring to the practice of convincing people to vote early while reaching out to those who haven’t cast ballots

Martinez added that Republicans faced the same challenges in Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. In all three states, Martinez said, “Republicans are sincerely disengaged.”

Kirk wrote this month that Turning Point had assigned a full-time staffer or volunteer to chase every low-propensity voter on their target list in Arizona.

Experts in voting patterns are doubtful Turning Point’s efforts to mobilize infrequent Trump-inclined voters will do much to affect the election. Turnout in the past two presidential elections has already drawn a record number of voters to the polls, the experts noted, meaning the pool of voters they are seeking to turn out is small and particularly unlikely to vote.

“You had the highest turnout in Michigan in those presidential election years than you’ve ever had before. It’s doubtful they’re going to get any more,” said Bernie Porn, a nonpartisan pollster who’s worked in the state for more than 30 years.

‘Just download the app’

For over a year, Turning Point has aggressively pitched its new voter mobilization app — a potentially lucrative venture that, if successful, critics believe could strengthen its grasp on key Republican Party machinery. In meetings with state and local Republican leaders, Turning Point operatives lean heavily into their close affiliation with Trump, who is a regular speaker at Turning Point conferences, according to the recordings obtained by theAP.

“We now are an official arm of the Trump campaign,” Turning Point operative Luke Malace told the members of the Monroe County Republican Party in Michigan earlier this year while urging the group to become a paying “client” of the company that made the Turning Point app.

Martinez, at the June event, told attendees concerned about helping Republicans win that the best way to help was to use the app.

“Sir, just download the app – and everybody in here, too, download the app,” said Martinez, a Turning Point official.

The app was designed by Superfeed, a company with direct ties to Turning Point’s leaders. Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point’s chief operating officer, sits on the company’s board and was formerly the company’s chairman, business filings show. Kirk’s mother-in-law also serves on Superfeed’s board.

It’s unclear how much the company has made from apps it designed for Turning Point and over a dozen other GOP and conservative groups, including state parties in Arizona, Nevada and Delaware. Recent state and federal campaign finance disclosures do not show any payments to Superfeed.

In private, a Turning Point representative did not seek to disguise the connection between the app and their group.

“It’s all in-house,” Malace told the county party in Michigan.

Malace did not respond to a request for comment. Superfeed officials also did not respond to a request for comment.

Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, said that Malace mischaracterized the organization’s relationship with the app maker. Turning Point does not receive any money earned by Superfeed, and the conservative group isn’t “financially involved” with the app maker, Kolvet said.

“Our relationship with Superfeed is we are a client and they are a vendor,” Kolvet said.

The app and Turning Point’s data plans draw criticism

Some Republicans told the AP that there are major issues with Turning Point’s app, which has minimal protections to secure voters’ personal information.

The platform allows anyone who uses it, including an AP reporter, to quickly gain access to detailed personal information, including voters’ full names, addresses, ages and cellphone numbers. That’s a departure from the security protocols adopted by other such platforms. Such protocols are designed to safeguard personal information and prevent rival parties from stealing data or spying on a campaign’s strategy.

But not everyone is critical of the app.

Matt Brown, chair of the Yakima County Republican Party in Washington, said he learned about the app during a talk at a Turning Point conference in December. Brown was wowed and decided to become a Superfeed client, and began using the app a few months ago. He declined to say how much the party pays Superfeed, but praised Turning Point’s new focus.

“They are doing the work that no one else wants to do and the party is not doing it,” Brown said of the group.

The app is seen by Republican strategists as the latest example of Turning Point becoming more focused on using data as a way to strengthen its Republican role in the future. And those strategists are concerned that Turning Point is not playing by established traditions of sharing data within the Republican ecosystem and is unprepared to do the kind of work needed to elect Republicans in swing states.

“We have had good ground games in the past, really good ground games. And they were run by the RNC,” said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Republican who is so closely associated with the Republican National Committee he has been referred to as “Mr. RNC” in the past. “It doesn’t make sense to turn that operation over to an outside organization that doesn’t have the institutional knowledge that the committee has.”

Turning Point, for example, is not sharing its voter data with Data Trust, a Republican information clearinghouse that allows GOP campaigns and groups to use data collected by groups throughout the party’s ecosystem. Other Republican operatives said Turning Point is not sharing data with key statewide campaigns in the battlegrounds they are prioritizing.

Such data is the “lifeblood” of modern electioneering, said Montague, the Arizona Republican who has been critical of Turning Point.

He said the group’s foray into providing other groups data is further evidence it is attempting “to take over the party at the national level.”

Turning Point’s spokesman denied the charge, saying the group was not seeking to take over the GOP and blaming their lack of sharing with the Data Trust on not having access when they started this work.

“It’s just craziness,” Kolvet said. “We don’t want the job.”

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ii. TYLER BOWYER {002}. BOWYER (002) made public statements demonstrating the contingency plan was cover for his attempt to change the outcome of the election. On November 27, 2020, he wrote, "#BidenCheated" and "Americans deserve the true election results." On December 15, 2020, after voting for Trump-Pence, BOWYER (002) wrote, "this just gives potential ground to not accept electors from states with competing electors." BOWYER (002), after Gohmert v. Pence was filed, posted to twitter: 52

Tyler Bowyer& · I)Qc 28,2020 lt's prett'J The Ptesid*t_t of the llfllted States Senate (VP) has the ii'ff(.)$<.lm !X'w:;;,-r of il WiN;:n ~htfl:: !:iff: IW!:t t:Of!lt)t.!tlng_;!;'fh:::J 1J1 f!{)fle at ~11, The 121h amendm_nt covers d!spute re

pix twit

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counts 1-9 = all

indictment03

Party Presidential Electors: • KELLI WARD (001). WARD (001) was the chair of the Arizona Republican party. She organized the fake electors' vote on December 14, 2020, and voted for Trump-Pence as a fake elector, falsely stating that she was "duly elected and qualified." After voting, WARD (001) declared the Arizona Republican electors as the "true electors." She later urged Pence to accept false electoral votes for Trump-Pence on January 6, 2021. She did not withdraw her vote even though no legal challenge successfully changed the outcome of

Arizona's 2020 Presidential Election. • TYLER BOWYER (002). BOWYER (002) voted for Trump-Pence as a fake elector on December 14, 2020, falsely stating that he was "duly elected and qualified." After voting, BOWYER (002) made statements indicating that he intended to have Pence accept the false electoral votes for Trump-Pence on January 6, 2021. BOWYER (002) did not withdraw his vote even though no legal challenge successfully changed the outcome of Arizona's 2020 Presidential Election ...

All eleven Arizona Republican electors and others sued Governor Doug Ducey on December 2, 2020, in Arizona Federal District Court Case Bowyer v. Ducey, No. CV-20-02321-PHX-DJH. The court dismissed their complaint on December 9, 2020, finding that the plaintiffs' claims, "fail in their particularity and plausibility" and that their '((expert reports' reach implausible conclusions, often because they are derived from wholly unreliable sources." The plaintiffs appealed ...

All 11 Arizona Republican electors, KELLI WARD (001), TYLER BOWYER (002), NANCY COTTLE (003), JACOB HOFFMAN (004), ANTHONY KERN (005), JAMES LAMON (006), ROBERT MONTGOMERY (007), SAMUEL MOORHEAD (008), LORRAINE PELLEGRINO (009), GREGORY SAFSTEN (010), and MICHAEL WARD (011), joined then-Texas Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert in suing Pence on December 27, 2020. Their complaint alleged that "Gohmert will object to the counting of Arizona electors voting for Biden, as well as to the Biden electors from the remaining Contested States." The plaintiffs attempted to have the court declare that Pence could "exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State." KELLI WARD (001) explained the purpose of the suit on twitter:

===

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Those charged over their roles as false electors include two sitting lawmakers, state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern. The former Arizona Republican party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, have been charged, as has Tyler Bowyer, a Republican national committeeman and Turning Point USA executive, and Jim Lamon, who ran for US Senate in 2022. The others charged in the fake electors scheme are Nancy Cottle, Robert Montgomery, Samuel Moorhead, Lorraine Pellegrino and Gregory Safsten.

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no lnx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/04/arizona-gop-turning-point-usa/

Democracy Dies in Darkness

EXCLUSIVE

How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network worked to purge officials who affirmed the 2020 election results

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker

November 4, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Tuesday in Chandler, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

PHOENIX — The young conservative activist had a plan, and he wanted the veteran Arizona House speaker to push it.

The two men huddled at a barbecue joint in January as the activist — Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA — unspooled his demands: Republican legislators, he insisted, should carve up booming and fast-diversifying Maricopa County, diluting the power of Democrats in a state that had helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency.

But the Republican House speaker, Rusty Bowers, ultimately balked at redrawing the state’s map to seize partisan advantage. As the pair’s political differences grew, the activist, who was half the speaker’s age, vowed revenge.

“Rusty, I will be working toward ensuring you do not win your election in 2022,” Bowyer warned in a March text message obtained by The Washington Post. “I appreciate your service, I will do whatever it takes to ensure you are retired.”

Soon, the state legislator faced a rush of ridicule on social media and in negative ads as Turning Point’s political arm launched a campaign to “Replace RINO Rusty.” The speaker lost his primary for an open state Senate seat in August to a Turning Point-backed Republican who called the 2020 election a “conspiracy headed up by the Devil himself.”

The takedown of one of the most powerful Republicans in the state illustrates the rise of Turning Point USA and its network of affiliates, which have pushed beyond their core mission of energizing college conservatives to turn Arizona into a laboratory for a new brand of Republican organizing. The decade-old nonprofit organization has helped transform the state GOP, seeking to elevate acolytes of former president Donald Trump and purge old-guard centrists who led in the tradition of the late Republican Sen. John McCain.

The group’s success is reflected in the Republican midterm election slate — nearly every statewide candidate and many of those farther down the ballot have embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. The political career of Kari Lake, the state’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, took off at a Turning Point event last year, and she has filled her campaign staff with former Turning Point employees. Lake has promised, if elected, to overhaul how votes are cast and counted in this pivotal swing state.

“They have a bigger impact than any other Republican group I know,” said Jeff DeWit, a former state treasurer in Arizona who served as chief operating officer for both of Trump’s presidential campaigns. “They’re more powerful than the RNC,” he said, referring to the Republican National Committee.

Tyler Bowyer, a longtime Turning Point leader, speaks in the ear of Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee and Republican candidate for the Arizona House, at an October canvassing event in Mesa, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Volunteers at a Turning Point Action get-out-the-vote event in October in Mesa. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)

Kathy Pearce, a Republican candidate for Arizona House, speaks at the Mesa event. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)]

This account of Turning Point’s quest to remake the Arizona Republican Party is based on audio recordings of private meetings, personal messages and interviews with more than 80 people, including current and former Turning Point employees, public officials and their staffers, political consultants, and state and local party activists who have interacted with the nonprofit’s leaders. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details or avoid professional reprisal.

The Post review found that Turning Point, which forged an early alliance with the pro-Trump movement in 2016, devised an aggressive strategy to enforce discipline and purity in a divided GOP that was struggling to overcome Democratic gains in the state. The group recruited like-minded activists into the party ranks and often used provocative rhetoric online to pressure old-guard Republicans and “barrage the left,” as one internal document put it, while creating a new political action committee to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into statewide and legislative campaigns.

Nationally, Turning Point solidified its identity in the MAGA era. Like Trump, Turning Point’s leaders gravitate toward messages primed to go viral on social media, including a recent call for a “hero” to bail out of jail the man accused of assaulting the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Founder Charlie Kirk, now 29, was the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of researchers. Kirk encouraged his followers to attend the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and a website promoting the rally listed Turning Point Action, the group’s political arm, as a backer.

The Attack: The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event

With more than $65 million in annual revenue, more than 400 employees and a massive network of conservative influencers, Turning Point’s vast network exerts its influence through a dizzying array of mediums, from podcasts to social media to concert-like rallies, funded by GOP megadonors and aimed at younger generations.

Kirk is a prolific fundraiser, using his connections in Trump’s inner circle to fete donors at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. But it’s Bowyer, 37, who translates that influence and those resources into raw political power in Arizona, a state increasingly setting the tone for the national GOP.

Tyler Bowyer describes his role at Turning Point.

Kirk and Bowyer declined to comment for this report. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA and its affiliates, said that both men effectively channel conservative interests and that the group’s years-long work in Arizona is “bearing significant fruit in 2022.” Kolvet sought to distance Turning Point from some of Bowyer’s political advocacy, which he said was undertaken in Bowyer’s “capacity as a Republican Party leader.”

In a private meeting with conservative activists this year, Bowyer remarked on his role at Turning Point by calling himself “the guy that basically runs everything,” according to an audio recording obtained by The Post. At another point in the conversation, he boasted of his enthusiasm for political confrontation: “I have giant balls.”

Tyler Bowyer boasts of his political mettle.

An attendee picks up a poster at the Turning Point Action event at Pioneer Park in Mesa in October. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Forged in the MAGA movement

It was January 2015, and a pivotal presidential election loomed.

Bowyer had just started to work for Turning Point as part of its expansion in Arizona and other parts of the West. He was also elected chair of the Maricopa County GOP, promising to revolutionize the party by recruiting a new generation of volunteers at the lowest levels of the party — a strategy now at the center of pro-Trump organizing.

Bowyer, who touts that his family has lived in Arizona for seven generations, had long chafed at the conventional party apparatus and longed for one more willing to push boundaries. As a student at Arizona State University, he earned the adoration of tea party activists when he ridiculed Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for expanding the state’s Medicaid program.

In the summer of 2015, Bowyer received a call from Trump’s campaign manager, who was trying to schedule a small gathering in Phoenix but was facing pushback from Republican state leaders who had recoiled at Trump’s style and uncompromising approach to immigration, according to a person familiar with the call.

The young activist and others helped organize and promote a rally that attracted thousands on a sweltering July day. Bowyer warmed up the crowd ahead of Trump’s 90-minute speech.

In the final months of the campaign, Kirk, then 22, took a leave from Turning Point to travel the country with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., 38 at the time. They focused on events tailored to students and appeared at a Fox News town hall aimed at millennials.

President Donald Trump with Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, in Washington in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As they campaigned in the Phoenix area, Bowyer recorded a video of Trump Jr. helping a stranded motorist and pushing a car in triple-digit heat. He posted it on Twitter, writing, “This is why I’m voting Trump!” The message, which has been viewed more than half a million times, made clear to Turning Point leaders the online appetite for pro-Trump content.

Trump went on to win Arizona in 2016, and Republicans swept other races. Turning Point and the Make America Great Again movement fell into a well-defined symbiosis: Kirk and his associates helped amplify Trump’s messages on social media, and the group’s fundraising exploded.

In 2018, Kirk relocated his enterprise from the Chicago suburbs, where he was raised, to a two-story headquarters in a Phoenix office park. The sprawling facility includes a television studio where several live-stream shows are filmed, near a wall decorated with a huge American flag and pennants from dozens of college campuses.

An opening ceremony drew big names from across the Republican Party’s ideological divide, including Gov. Doug Ducey. Bowyer, who recently had been promoted to chief operating officer, addressed the crowd.

“One thing I hope that you take away from today,” he said, “is that you see all of the wonderful things that are happening across the country in the name of conservatism.”

A rival to the GOP mainstream

Within months, Arizona Republicans were in crisis. Democrats had swept the 2018 midterm election, flipping a U.S. Senate seat, the secretary of state’s office and races down the ballot. Arizona had quickly gone from a conservative stronghold to a true swing state. Turning Point leaders and other conservatives saw it as confirmation that the state party needed a dramatically different strategy.

Bowyer viewed the results as affirmation of his long-standing philosophy: “If the Republican Party doesn’t do its job, you know, then the Republican Party has to go,” he said in the private meeting with activists this year, according to audio obtained by The Post.

Bowyer talks to activists about the Republican Party.

Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, declined to elaborate on Bowyer’s comments but said, “Turning Point is confident Mr. Bowyer had the best interest of the conservative movement and the organization in mind.”

Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer at Turning Point Action, speaks at the canvassing event in Mesa. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

In January 2019, party members gathered in a Phoenix church to pick their next leader.

Bowyer threw his support behind Kelli Ward,a former state senator who had unsuccessfully run for U.S. Senate twice and had publicized her disdain for the establishment wing of the party. She pledged to recruit MAGA Republicans as foot soldiers and oversee a transformation of the state party.

Bowyer worked the room that day with help from Jake Hoffman, a Turning Point consultant. Hoffman ran a marketing firm that worked for a PAC that had supported Ward’s failed Senate bids.

Ward prevailed over a McCain ally, and Hoffman helped her transition into the role of party chair. When Republicans wanted to reach Ward, they started with Hoffman, whose businesses have remained key vendors for the state party, according to campaign finance records.

As the state’s top Republicans kept their distance from Ward, Turning Point saw an opportunity. Her title gave Turning Point credibility.

Ward, in a statement, called Hoffman and Bowyer “friends and allies” and “two of the most righteous people I know.”

Hoffman, a former school board member and town councilman, was listed on Turning Point’s staff directory through at least early 2019. In 2020, The Post revealed that he was running a deceptive online operation for Turning Point’s political arm in which teenagers peppered the internet with pro-Trump messaging, some using fake accounts. Hoffman defended the practice at the time.

Over the years, Hoffman has been an administrator for the Facebook pages of Turning Point, Kirk and Trump Jr., according to a person familiar with the setup. Hoffman did not dispute the details of his social media work for Trump Jr. or Turning Point, saying that he was “happy to consult with the organization.”

That fall, Hoffman won a race for the Arizona House, giving Turning Point an ally in the statehouse.

Turning Point was no longer on the GOP’s fringes. It was at the party’s center.

Voters arrive for a Kari Lake event at the Rancho de Tia Rosa restaurant in Mesa in early October. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)

Attendees at the Rancho de Tia Rosa event, including Bowyer, center, watch a video before Lake's appearance. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Attendees at the GOP gubernatorial nominee's event at the Mesa restaurant. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

‘Repercussions could be big’

In 2020, Turning Point told donors its task was activating young voters, registering thousands to vote and delivering Arizona and other swing states to Trump, according to documents obtained by The Post.

The group aimed to capitalize on the electorate’s intensifying distrust of government, media and political parties, the documents show. Opportunities to do so expanded with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Kirk argued that the “China Virus” proved the need for Trump’s promised wall on the southern border,and text messages sent by Turning Point Action falsely claimed that the government was “sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a covid-19 vaccine.”

When Trump resumed holding large campaign events, Turning Point Action’s Students for Trump helped pack Phoenix’s Dream City Church for a June 2020 rally. Outside, police in riot gear clashed with protesters. Inside, the megachurch’s cavernous auditorium offered refuge from mask mandates.

Kirk prays at a "Freedom Night in America" event last month at Dream City Church in Phoenix.(Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Attendees at the Turning Point event at the Phoenix church last month. The group hosted a major Trump rally at the church in June 2020. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Ahead of the election, Turning Point Action touted its “round-the-clock Digital War-Room to promote content we create and constantly barrage the left online,” according to a slide deck obtained by The Post. It seized on culture war issues such as how race is taught in public schools, the rights of transgender individuals and illegal immigration.

But Trump lost Arizona — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had ceded the state since 1996. Quickly, Turning Point became a linchpin of Trump’s efforts to deny his defeat and reverse his loss.

Bowyer, elected that year to the Republican National Committee, gathered with Hoffman and Ward at the state party’s headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the state’s presidential electors met to cast their votes for Biden, according to state party tweets. As part of a seven-state plan, the trio signed paperwork falsely declaring themselves the state’s electors. That plan is now a focus of congressional investigators and prosecutors probing Trump’s quest to stay in power.

On Twitter, the state party asked followers whether they would be willing to die to keep Trump in the White House. Another post proposed “contempt & jail time” for county officials who affirmed Biden’s win.

The posts alarmed Trey Terry, 35, a conservative who lives near a Republican county official who had helped oversee the election and was facing death threats as a result. Terry urged Bowyer to help tone down the messaging in a private exchange over Twitter that was obtained by The Post.

“His kids and wife can’t go anywhere without being harassed as they go in and out of their house,” Terry wrote, describing the county official’s experience. “That s--- is out of line. So it’s hard for me to ignore.”

Bowyer responded that while he had sympathy for the county official, elected leaders must adhere to the party’s platform and “repercussions could be big for those who aren’t on the same page with the party.”

Terry accused party leaders of “whipping” up activists “based on zero evidence” of widespread fraud. Bowyer did not disagree but suggested that his approach is the reason for Turning Point’s success.

“I didn’t build a 45 million dollar a year organization,” he wrote, by “misunderstanding the base.”

Kirk speaks during at the Dream City Church event last month. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)]

Meanwhile, Turning Point Action arranged for seven buses to take 350 activists from several states to D.C. for the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House, according to three people familiar with the rally planning. Bowyer and Kirk have been interviewed by the House committee investigating the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that followed the rally, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee, tweeted a photo of himself speaking to “thousands of patriots” at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5.

“Don’t get comfortable,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Fight like hell.”

Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, said the group’s involvement that day was “isolated to the president’s speech at the Ellipse.”

In the months that followed, Maricopa County became a hotbed of unsupported claims about the election, and Trump allies launched a haphazard review of the results, over the objection of county officials and election experts.

The purge

The next year, Bowyer tried to convince Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, that the party needed to intensify its efforts to maintain power, Bowers said.

With a map in hand, the activist zeroed in on sprawling Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60 percent of the state’s voters, and called for breaking it into four counties, one that would concentrate most Democrats and three that would favor Republicans.

Hoffman, the marketing consultant close to Turning Point who was elected to the state House in 2020, introduced legislation to make it happen — but the opposition of legislative leadership ensured its demise.

A few months later, the speaker testified before the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Bowers detailed Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and his own decision to resist, intensifying the attacks from Turning Point influencers.

Alone in Washington, Rusty Bowers tells world what happened in Arizona

Turning Point expanded its political operation this year with a new PAC under Bowyer’s direction. The group has unleashed more than $415,000 in Arizona since July, according to state records, and has reported more than $600,000 in spending to the Federal Election Commission. About half of its spending in Arizona has boosted Lake after a bitter primary that pitted her against the party establishment, including the governor. But the money has also extended to legislative races in which spending is traditionally restrained. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to Hoffman’s firm, records show.

The PAC helped a crew of far-right candidates win primary contests in state races, including Steve Montenegro, who helped coordinate bombastic election-denying messaging during the review of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots; Liz Harris, who routinely spreads election falsehoods; and Smith, the Turning Point Action enterprise director who spoke at a D.C. rally the day before the insurrection.

Turning Point has played a wide-ranging role in Lake’s campaign, and former Turning Point staffers have filled key positions on her campaign, including a top adviser and a former press secretary. This summer, Lake said on Twitter that her daughter was involved with the group. In fact, she’s a full-time Turning Point employee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“Turning Point has been essential in turning … enthusiasm into a tsunami of activists that naturally flock to candidates like Kari Lake,” Caroline Wren, a senior adviser on the Lake campaign, said in a statement.

Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds

Lake’s rise also created new opportunities for Hoffman, whose firm was paid about $2.3 million by a pro-Lake super PAC,according to state records. A complaint about the source of the PAC’s funding is under review by the Maricopa County elections department. Hoffman said his company is “routinely contracted” for such work because it is “one of the leading creative agencies in Arizona.”

Lake, a former television anchor, gained MAGA stardom at a Turning Point Action candidate forum in the summer of 2021, when she urged the crowd not to forget about the 2020 election. When Trump spoke on the same stage and name-checked Lake, the room erupted in applause. He cocked his head and clapped. “This could be a big night for you,” he said.

One year later, Lake won the Republican primary and celebrated at a victory party at a Scottsdale resort. On the lush lawn, young women in semiformal dresses and strappy heels lined up for photos. Music blared from inside a ballroom as partygoers snapped selfies. The scene, reminiscent of a graduation party or school dance, highlighted how Turning Point has thrust young people to the center of the state party’s transformation.

One is Carrera Horan, 18, who attended the Turning Point summit that elevated Lake and watches Kirk’s videos on Instagram. “He tells you what you need to be hearing rather than just what you would want to hear,” she said.

Daniel Fuentes, 25, joined his Christian university’s Turning Point chapter, which offered a ready-made friend group. He tunes in to Kirk’s radio show every day on Spotify.

Fuentes is volunteering for Lake’s campaign, and he attended a recent Turning Point canvassing event at a Mesa park, one of 200 that the group says it has hosted nationally this cycle. With the smell of chicken roasting in barbecue pits wafting through the air, he listened intently as Bowyer spoke of the need to “rebrand the conservative movement and the Republican Party as a hope for a future generation.”

Fuentes argued that “Democrat clubs on college campuses are not doing this. Liberal, woke, feminist clubs, they’re not out there telling people: ‘Let’s go out and knock doors. Let’s go out and, you know, sign up to be a precinct [committeeman].’ ”

Looking to 2024

The midterms will test whether Turning Point can win races or just disrupt them.

After winning the primary, Lake quickly made overtures to the state’s GOP establishment.

When Bowyer learned that Lake was meeting with a former state GOP chairman who had been close to McCain, he erupted at her during a phone call as she traveled on a donor’s plane, warning that the base would turn against her, according to three people who heard about his comments.

Lake was unfazed, these people said. Kolvet said Lake and Bowyer “maintain a great relationship.”

With a growing number of well-placed allies, Turning Point is poised to again push election-related legislation favorable to Republicans ahead of 2024. A preview of that came last week when Lake promoted a legislative proposal from Hoffman to punish media outlets that mistakenly report election results.

The Turning Point strategy, said Kirk Adams, a top Republican operative in the state and Gov. Ducey’s former chief of staff, is “all geared toward 2024,” aimed at elevating GOP officials at every level who could thwart an election outcome unfavorable to the party. “Get a compliant governor,” Adams said, describing the strategy. “Get a compliant secretary of state. Get compliant legislative leadership.”

Turning Point’s leaders are looking ahead to 2024. The group’s political arm has hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), widely seen as a possible presidential contender, at rallies aimed at high-stakes races in Arizona and beyond.

Lake has embraced the title of “DeSantis of the West.”Others view her as a potential vice-presidential contender. For the moment, she wants to be governor — and if she wins, it will be with Turning Point’s help.

One week before the election, a Kirk aide — who also works as Lake’s deputy field director — kicked off a rally outside a steakhouse in suburban Chandler by praising both of her bosses. Once onstage, Kirk and Lake embraced.

“Kari’s really special,” Kirk said.

“Thank you for the compliment. I’ll take it,” the candidate said. “… We have to tune in to people like Charlie.”

Jacqueline Alemany, Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey and Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 9, 2021 Issue

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

By Jane Mayer

August 2, 2021

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

:{:{As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it}:. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes.

The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”}:

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fannwhen she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.

Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

:{It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Societyfounding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. 

The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.}:

Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell,who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.

:{In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence.

With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”}:

Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”

On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”

In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”

Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”

Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in thestate had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.

A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act,eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values.By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.

The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis,who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.

Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.

Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based groupthat, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.

Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy,a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committee and a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections. 

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme,along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise.As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases,we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters.

Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation.Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. 

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.

Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”

Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.”At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.

A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”

Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”

“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.

By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless.

But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network [fitton cnp] —a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.

While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”

Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.

For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiativehas set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”

Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?

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20DE13BB-5966-4F9C-BF22-387EC5F3F47E

FINCHEM LAKE ~ DEMS

Name: TURNING POINT PAC INC Mailing address: 4930 E. BEVERLY ROAD, SUITE 2000 PHOENIX, AZ 85044 Federal tax status: 527 POLITICAL COMMITTEE State of incorporation, registration or partnership: DELAWARE

GGL 1225

Including results for TYLER ***BOWYER*** PAC FEC ARIZONA TURNING POINT

Search only for TYLER BOWEN PAC FEC ARIZONA TURNING POINT

[### FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION April 14, 2025 VIA ...

FEC.gov

https://www.fec.gov › files › legal › murs](https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/murs/8344/8344_08.pdf)

PDF

Apr 14, 2025 — Tyler Bowyer, Executive Director. Turning Point PAC Inc. 4930 E. Beverly Road, Suite 2000. Phoenix, AZ 85044. RE: MUR 8344. Arizona Republicans ...

4 pages

The Complaint alleges that Arizona Republicans Who Believe In Treating Others With 20 Respect and John Webster in his official capacity as treasurer (the “Committee”), an independent expenditure-only political committee,1 21 paid to run an advertising campaign on billboards in the 22 Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area which contained express advocacy for a 2024 candidate for 23 president, and which lacked adequate disclaimers, in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended.2 24 The Complaint argues that the disclaimers displayed on the billboards 25 were unreadable “when accounting for digital pixelation and drivers’ inability to see the disclaimer at high rates of speed.”3

[### 7.29.2025_Turning_Point_PAC.pdf

Arizona Secretary of State (.gov)

https://azsos.gov › sites › default › files › vrka › 7...](https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/vrka/2025/7.29.2025_Turning_Point_PAC.pdf)

PDF

Jul 29, 2025 — Name: TURNING POINT PAC INC. Mailing address: 4930 E. BEVERLY ROAD, SUITE 2000 PHOENIX, AZ 85044. Federal tax status: 527 POLITICAL COMMITTEE.

7 pages

Missing: FEC ‎| Show results with: FEC

[### Turning Point PAC just filed an FEC Complaint against the ...

X · tylerbowyer

8.7K+ likes · 1 year ago](https://x.com/tylerbowyer/status/1854575886177067465)

Not only was their campaign an embarrassing failure, we believe they did not make proper disclosures to the general public. We will pursue to ...

Turning Point PAC just filed an FEC Complaint against the sham "Republicans for Harris" campaign in Arizona Not only was their campaign an embarrassing failure, we believe they did not make proper disclosures to the general public. We will pursue to the fullest extent. (1/2)

[### How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2022/11/04](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/04/arizona-gop-turning-point-usa/)

Nov 4, 2022 — Charlie Kirk's Turning Point network worked to purge officials who affirmed the 2020 election results. November 4, 2022More than 3 years ago.

Missing: BOWEN ‎| Show results with: BOWEN

[### Turning Point Action events under inquiry over election law ...

The Arizona Republic

https://www.azcentral.com › elections › 2022/08/02 › t...](https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/08/02/turning-point-action-voter-rally-bashing-rusty-bowers-under-inquiry-campaign-finance-violations/10209890002/)

Aug 2, 2022 — The Arizona Secretary of State's Office has started an initial inquiry into whether get-out-the-vote rallies organized by Turning Point Action, a tax-exempt ...

Turning Point Action events under scrutiny by Arizona Secretary of State over election law violations

Richard Ruelas

Arizona Republic

Aug. 2, 2022, 9:23 a.m. MT

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office has started an initial inquiry into whether get-out-the-vote rallies organized by Turning Point Action, a tax-exempt organization led by conservative personality Charlie Kirk, violated campaign finance laws.

Though the head of Turning Point Action described the two rallies, held on Saturdays in July at parks in Goodyear and Mesa, as community events designed to educate, the complaint suggests they were designed to promote specific Republican candidates in the August primary election.

The complaint, released to The Republic on Monday, was filed by Tyler Montague, a Republican political consultant who heads a group called Public Integrity Alliance.

His initial complaint, filed on June 23, mentioned a July 9 Goodyear rally whose online promotion featured Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee who was also seeking a state House seat. “This appears to be a possible illegal collaboration between (Turning Point) and Smith,” the complaint said.

Montague filed an additional complaint on July 25, regarding an event held on Saturday in Mesa that featured David Farnsworth, who was running for a state Senate seat.

“ … Turning Point Action literally advertising that they are doing a joint door knocking activity WITH a candidate they are supporting in that candidates’ district,” read the email Montague sent to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Included with the email was a screenshot of a flyer posted on social media that featured a picture of Farnsworth, who was running against Rusty Bowers, the sitting House Speaker who was looking to cross chambers.

If the Secretary of State’s Office found merit in its initial investigation, it could forward the matter to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

Penalties for violating election laws are civil, with penalties based on the dollar figure at issue. In this case the value would include the cost of reserving the spaces at the public parks in Goodyear and Mesa, the cost of any banners or signage and the value of the social media promotion. If the conduct was found to be egregious, the penalties could triple.

Kirk, who was at both events, declined to discuss Turning Point's involvement in Arizona's elections.

The Mesa event held Saturday had speakers, including the head of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, telling attendees to vote for Farnsworth and oust Bowers. Volunteers were then given a list of addresses to visit and deposit door hangers promoting Farnsworth and denouncing Bowers.

Election coverage: Live updates across Arizona | Arizona election results

While the rally was sponsored by Turning Point Action, the social welfare group, the campaign materials were paid for by Turning Point PAC, a political advocacy group created in May.

Volunteers who visited all their assigned addresses were treated to a free Mexican food lunch. It was not clear which entity footed the bill for the lunch.

“We’re going to retire Rusty Bowers,” said Smith, who served as emcee for the Saturday event. “That’s why we’re here today.”

Bowers gained national exposure for his testimony before the Congressional committee investigating the root causes of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 about the pressure put on him by President Donald Trump to somehow invalidate the 2020 election results in Arizona. But those actions also earned him the ire of Trump-supporting Republicans in his district.

'We just don't have the evidence': Rep. Rusty Bowers says Giuliani showed no fraud

The rallies in Goodyear and Mesa were among the “Super Saturday” events put on by Turning Point Action in Arizona and five other states. Similar rallies are scheduled, according to the group’s website, through Election Day.

Tyler Bowyer, the head of Turning Point Action, told The Republic after Saturday’s event in Mesa that it was an “education-related” social gathering, though he said that organizations like his were allowed to do political work if they chose.

Turning Point Action is a type of nonprofit entity known as a 501(c)(4), after the section of the IRS code that sets the rules for it. Such entities, under the code, are supposed to benefit the overall social welfare.

The entities can do political work, particularly lobbying for legislation, so long as it is related to its founding mission. They can also, according to IRS guidelines, advocate for candidates based on the groups' stated organizing principles.

Turning Point Action’s organizing principles, according to its tax forms, are to raise “awareness about free markets and capitalism,” initiate “civic action” among young people and serve as a resource for “free market thinkers.”

The speeches on Saturday did not include mentions of the free market. They were heavy on patriotism and grievances against a perceived ruling class.

Bowyer told the crowd on Saturday to “get the word out to support America First conservatives.”

Ward told the crowd they were engaged in a “spiritual battle” that waged “totalitarianism versus freedom.”

“The right to speak freely is under attack here,” Ward said. “There is no such thing as liberty if you are unable to think or speak … what you believe.”

The Republic covered Saturday’s event in Mesa from a distance because organizers said that it was closed to the press. The Goodyear event, a spokesperson told The Republic, was also closed to the press.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office sent letters on July 21 to the campaign managers of Smith as well as Turning Point PAC, asking for a response.

No correspondence was sent to Turning Point Action, the entity Montague mentioned in his initial complaint.

On July 29, the office sent a second letter to Turning Point PAC about the Mesa event. It also sent letters to the candidates featured on promotional materials for the event: Farnsworth, Mary Ann Mendoza and Barbara Parker.

Farnsworth told The Republic after Saturday’s event that he did not help plan it. The campaigns of Mendoza and Parker did not respond to an emailed request from The Republic seeking comment.

Each letter from the Secretary of State asks for a response to Montague’s allegation that the candidates coordinated with Turning Point PAC.

The letter to Smith wrongly described him as an employee of Turning Point PAC, a political action committee created in May. Smith works for the social welfare organization Turning Point Action.

Turning Point PAC, according to Bowyer, has no employees.

Its organizing statement filed with the Federal Elections Commission lists its address as the same building in Phoenix that houses Turning Point Action. In that same statement, the PAC said it was not connected with any other organization.

Politics and the pulpit: Inside one of Charlie Kirk's Freedom Night in America events at Dream City Church

In documents filed with the Arizona Secretary of State, Turning Point PAC listed a chairperson, Melodie Johnson. The PAC did not respond to a request from The Republic for comment.

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that Bowyer was in charge of Turning Point Action and the political action committee. “Tyler runs both,” Kolvet said during a phone call on Sunday. Kolvet then clarified that Bowyer might only consult with the PAC but he was not sure.

Neither Kolvet nor Bowyer answered follow-up questions to clarify the relationship.

Here's how Kari Lake could shake up a three-way Senate race in ArizonaKari Lake to launch Senate bid at ultra-rich lifestyle magazine HQThe US House is in turmoil with no speaker. Here's what happens nowWhat's the migrant situation at the AZ-Mexico border?

After the Mesa event on Saturday, Farnsworth said that he had been notified of the complaint filed with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. He said he checked with an attorney to make sure it was fine for him to give a speech at the rally.

Farnsworth said he did not plan the event. He had been invited a few weeks prior, he said.

He admitted he was not familiar with the location of the rally, Red Mountain Park in east Mesa, though it was in the district he hoped to lead. The area was redrawn into his district with the latest district map, he said.

Farnsworth did say that the event would provide a benefit to his campaign, even the weekend before end of voting.

“I think so,” he said. “There’s a lot of undecided voters, and, of course, a lot of people who don’t pay attention until Election Day.”

[### Tyler Bowyer

Turning Point Action

https://tpaction.com › bio › tylerbowyer](https://tpaction.com/bio/tylerbowyer)

Tyler Bowyer is a 7th Generation Arizonan and conservative activist. He has served as Republican Precinct Committeeman, Congressional Advisory Chairman, Regent.

Missing: PAC ‎FEC

[### Arizona 'fake elector' indictments make it tough for Turning ...

MS NOW

https://www.ms.now › the-reidout › reidout-blog › ariz...](https://www.ms.now/the-reidout/reidout-blog/arizona-fake-electors-charges-turning-point-usa-rcna149465)

Apr 26, 2024 — Turning Point USA, the extremist-friendly, Donald Trump-loving organization for MAGA youth, is having one of its worst weeks yet from a ...

Missing: PAC ‎FEC

[### Tyler Bowyer: TPA's Ballot-Chasing Success 'Disastrous' ...

AllSides

https://www.allsides.com › news › politics-exclusive-tyler...](https://www.allsides.com/news/2024-10-20-1815/politics-exclusive-tyler-bowyer-tpas-ballot-chasing-success-disastrous-dems)

Oct 21, 2024 — Ballot chasing has long propped up weak Democrat candidates, but Republicans have adopted and perfected the strategy in 2024 and its paying ...

Missing: PAC ‎FEC

[### Turning Point USA members charged with election ...

Facebook · Fountain Hills Democratic Club

5 comments · 1 year ago](https://www.facebook.com/groups/www.FHDemClub.org/posts/1716479342212901/)

Just after two thugs from Turning Point USA were charged with accosting and assaulting an ASU faculty member on campus, now the COO of ...

Fountain Hills Democratic Club ·

Eric Landau

·April 25, 2024 ·

Just after two thugs from Turning Point USA were charged with accosting and assaulting an ASU faculty member on campus, now the COO of Hannah Toth's employer Turning Point Action, the youth-targeting affiliate of TP USA, is among the twenty charged today by the State of Arizona for 2020 Presidential election interference. The Washington Post article lists them all, including:

"Tyler Bowyer, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona and chief operating officer of the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point Action."

[### Turning Point PAC spends big in Maricopa County races

The Arizona Republic

https://www.azcentral.com › elections › 2024/10/17 › t...](https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/17/turning-point-pac-spends-big-in-maricopa-county-races/75708718007/)

Oct 17, 2024 — A political action committee started by the conservative organization Turning Point USA is spending heavily to help some Republican ...

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