WASHINGTON—When Blake Neff first started working with Charlie Kirk in 2022, he doubted the conservative activist’s message would land with its intended audience.
“I was like, ‘Young people are all libs. This is just not going to work,’” Neff told The Epoch Times.
Then he saw the fruits of Kirk’s labor: scores of debates on college campuses; the mastery of social media; huge, in-person events such as AmericaFest; in 2024, Turning Point Action’s get-out-the-vote operation in purple states, which helped swing the presidential election for President Donald Trump.
Kirk, who worked to change minds across America, also changed the mind of someone much closer to him.
“I was wrong, and he was correct that there was all of this potential to win over young people,” Neff said. He became a co-host of the Charlie Kirk Show. And on Sept. 10, he was 10 feet from Kirk when the latter was assassinated in Orem, Utah.
Kirk, a man of faith and indomitable energy, has left a massive legacy that Americans on all sides are examining. Those on the right remember him as a man who advanced their causes—and in very concrete ways.
Conservative and Republican insiders who spoke with The Epoch Times credit him with helping them break through to young Americans, a challenge that seemed insurmountable during the Obama era.
His personality and conviction, along with the infrastructure he built and the donations he raised, changed the way many young people thought and voted, including in 2024.
“There is no question that Charlie Kirk moved the needle in election after election,” Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia and a past activist for Republican presidential campaigns, wrote in a message to The Epoch Times.
“But more important than the elections was his calm, Christian-focused openness to discussion of some of the most challenging issues in our society today.”
A year and a half before midterms that could prove challenging for their party, GOP insiders hope the youthful energy Kirk helped kindle continues to build.
After Kirk’s assassination, Turning Point USA said it received tens of thousands of requests to open new chapters at schools across America.
Brian Szmytke, who advised the Trump campaign and the Michigan Republican Party in 2024, predicted to The Epoch Times that Kirk’s organization “will probably be the preeminent organization in the country, if not the entire world.”
On Sept. 18, Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, was named the new CEO of TPUSA.
Erika Kirk said in a video message days after her husband’s death that “the movement my husband built will not die.” It will, she said, become “greater than ever.”
A Serious Force
Kirk launched TPUSA in 2012 at age 18, just after graduating from Wheeling High School in the suburbs of Chicago. He spent years courting donors and building the organization.
Wes Farno, a campaign strategist with more than a quarter-century of experience in politics, told The Epoch Times that Kirk’s youth when he started TPUSA was key to its ultimate success.
“He just spoke the language of that age demographic,” he said.
Gabriel Guidarini, who chairs the Ohio College Republican Federation, remembered Kirk taking off during the 2010s thanks to viral clips of his debates.
The activist “was doing a much more effective job than the Republican Party at countering the macro-cultural Obama phenomenon,” said Guidarini, who was speaking in that capacity and not as Turning Point Action’s Ohio Field Representative.
Kirk picked a steep hill to climb.
In 2008, four years before Kirk launched TPUSA, 66 percent of voters 18 to 29 chose candidate Barack Obama for president, more than twice the number that voted for John McCain.
Mitt Romney made modest headway in 2012, receiving 37 percent of that vote to 60 percent for Obama, according to a Tufts University analysis. Trump earned the same share of that bloc in 2016, while 55 percent went to Hillary Clinton.
Youth culture leaned left, too. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, transgender rights activism, and other social justice movements frequently dominated campuses and conversations.
At the height of 2010s progressivism, real-world expansion was not always easy for Kirk.
Seven or eight years ago, “TPUSA chapters had a significant amount of trouble getting recognized by their universities,” Tyler Coward of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) told The Epoch Times. FIRE has advocated for TPUSA and other groups across the spectrum facing such obstacles.
Szmytke said that kind of opposition helped make TPUSA cooler.
“Framing your conservatism not as the establishment but as rebellion against dominant liberal campus culture is crucial to appealing to the younger demographic,” he said.
Despite challenges along the way, TPUSA grew. It now says it has more than 250,000 student members across over 3,500 high school and college campuses.
In 2019, Kirk launched Turning Point Action, a platform to campaign for candidates.
Many conservative and Republican-aligned speakers and organizations exist, and not all of them make much of a difference.
When did insiders realize that Kirk and his group were a serious force?
Neff, Kirk’s co-host, recalled Kirk’s events a few years ago at the University of Texas San Antonio and San Diego State University that truly wowed him, more so than smaller ones before that time.
“One, the event is gigantic. Two, Charlie is a superstar at them. Three, a very diverse crew of young people are there,” he said of the Sunbelt rallies.
Szmytke, who first got involved in politics as a 12-year-old volunteer on the 2008 McCain campaign, dates the shift to 2021 or 2022.
Kirk and his people were “investing in what we would consider to be permanent infrastructure, which is something that we traditionally don’t see in outside organizations,” he said.
TP Action tested the waters in the 2022 midterms, the cycle when an anticipated “red wave” of victories diminished to a “red trickle.” Kari Lake and Blake Masters, both endorsed by TP Action, lost their respective races for governor and senator in Arizona.
TP Action and Kirk kept fighting.
2024 Selling Point
Farno said the more recent election cycle made it clear to him that Kirk’s organization was built differently.
“2024 was an election cycle that sold me,” he said.
TP Action deployed ballot chasers in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan, three critical swing states. The effort, which targeted $108 million in fundraising, sought to activate Republicans who sat out recent presidential elections.
Szmytke said it quickly became obvious TP Action and Kirk “were going to be a formidable force” in 2024.
In addition to fundraising prowess, they had what he called “one of the greatest resources” for a field organizer.
“They had a massive database of college activists and people that just graduated college, that maybe needed a job, or people that were out of school for the summer and would do something part-time,” he said.
“They were able to tap into that very quickly, versus having to go and do traditional recruitment.”
The leader did not shy away from that work himself. Neff recalled that Kirk found time to text or call disengaged voters. He also badgered his co-workers to vote early.
That was just a sliver of a busy schedule. In the fall of 2024, Kirk led the “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour” across U.S. college campuses.
TP Action took part in other events that year in Arizona, Michigan, and another swing state, Georgia.
Trump garnered 46 percent of the vote from voters aged 18 to 29 in the 2024 election—a significant uptick from 2020, when he netted 36 percent of them.
A Tufts University analysis found that the president received 56 percent of the vote among young men.
A majority of young white voters favored Trump, a shift from 2020, when more of those voters picked candidate Joe Biden over Trump. Support for the Democratic presidential candidate also ebbed among young non-white voters.
Farno said Trump’s gains among young Americans “happened because of Charlie Kirk.”
Szmytke said Kirk “was absolutely critical” to those trends as well as the victory in Michigan, which Trump lost in 2020.
“If you walked into a local Republican Party headquarters, you would see people wearing Turning Point shirts that had come from Turning Point to make calls as an organized effort,” he recalled.
Farno said he and his colleagues discovered that an increasing number of their young, grassroots volunteers had TPUSA ties.
Neff, too, credited Kirk with helping turn out young conservatives—though he said Kirk “would never claim he singlehandedly did that.”
“He would claim he played a big role in it. And I think he did,” Neff added.
At Kirk’s AmericaFest in December 2024, Trump discussed his success with the youth at the ballot box. He also thanked Kirk and his team “for their relentless efforts to achieve this historic victory.”
“The Democrats and the media said Turning Point could never run a ground game. They weren’t experienced. They didn’t know Charlie, right?” Trump said.
Momentum
Although Trump improved with young voters in 2024, that support could be slipping.
August Gallup polling showed that 32 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 approved of his performance, down from 34 percent in April.
Pew polling from last month found that 33 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Americans approved or strongly approved of Trump’s handling of the presidency, a decline from 36 percent in early April and 41 percent at the start of his second term.
With midterms ahead, a surge in TPUSA chapter requests is among the factors driving GOP insiders’ hopes that the Turning Point phenomenon continue to deliver, though not just among young Americans.
Both Szmytke and Farno described surges of interest in local Republican organizations with which they are familiar.
There are also early signs that Republican under-performance in special elections—a trend through most of 2025—could change.
On Sept. 16, Democrat XP Lee defeated Republican Ruth Bittner in a special election for a seat in the Minnesota House. Like Kirk, the woman they were replacing, Democrat Melissa Hortman, was slain in an act of political violence.
Lee took about 61 percent of the vote, 2 points less than Hortman in 2024.
Neff, who once doubted Kirk’s mission to the young, noted their importance to political success.
“You can’t have a dynamic national movement without young people. And he understood that,” Neff said.
