How Turning Point, a pro-Trump youth group, remade the Arizona GOP

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 senator 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.

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 mega-donors 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.

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.”

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.

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…