Conventional wisdom has long held that high turnout helps Democratic presidential candidates win the White House.
No more, says Trump’s top ally, Charlie Kirk, who runs Turning Point USA and is leading the charge to find the “low propensity” voters he believes will propel the former president back to power.
A series of polls show Trump making gains among young, black and Hispanic voters, groups that have historically voted in smaller numbers than other demographic groups.
So when thousands of conservatives gathered in Detroit, Michigan, for the Turning Point Action People’s Congress, the exhibit hall was filled with booths dedicated to voter registration drives and grassroots efforts to turn “maybes” into “definitive”.
Workshops with titles like ‘The First Seven Seconds: How to Execute Your Initial Contact’ and ‘Lead Your Constituency, Lead Your Country’ were full.
Charlie Kirk, director of Turning Point Action, with Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, on stage in Detroit, Michigan
The big draw will be Trump himself on Saturday night.
But the theme of the three-day meeting is finding the votes that will return Trump to power, Kirk said. And that means “low propensity voters.”
‘It’s tempting and easy to say he’s going to fight for me… he will, but first you have to fight for him. You should go register new voters,’ he told several thousand supporters in a loud, fireworks-filled keynote speech that shook the conference room.
‘You must find low propensity voters in your life and register them to vote.
‘According to a new poll, the people least likely to vote are the most pro-Trump in this election.
‘That means if we don’t do a good job of driving turnout, if we don’t do a good job of taking ownership of our neighborhoods, if we don’t do a good job of registering new voters. I say that in November we could hear those bitter words… that Joe Biden is re-elected for another term as president of the United States.’
TO CNN analysis of three NBC polls found that Biden has a four-point lead among people who voted in the 2020 and 2022 midterm elections.
But Trump led by 12 points among people who voted in 2020 but not in 2022.
Trump’s lead extends to a whopping 20 points among those who voted in neither election, and nearly two-thirds of those people said they had a negative view of Biden’s performance as president.
Robert Broderick and Rachel dance before the start of the Turning Point Action conservative grassroots convention in Huntington Place, Detroit, Michigan.
Donald Trump is scheduled to address the convention on Saturday. He is seen here at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this month.
An odd dynamic was created at a gathering often known as much for the rowdy antics of its young attendees and the fiery rhetoric of its speakers as for its political strategy.
So, although fans crowded around a gold Mercedes to take photos and potential vice president-elect Vivek Ramaswami took the stage to chants of ‘USA, USA, USA’, the popular phrase of the weekend was the decidedly academic expression ‘low propensity voters’.
‘Maybe they’re not registered to vote or maybe they are registered to vote, but it’s a little bit harder to mobilize them. They are what we call low-propensity voters,” said Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, describing the launch of Trump Force 47 as a grassroots effort to boost turnout.
Grant Raphael is at the forefront of the initiative, as a regional organizer for BLEXIT, a group that encourages blacks to leave the Democratic Party.
He was manning the group’s booth, filled with T-shirts that said “Empower, Awaken” and signs that said “Blessed, Not Oppressed,” Friday night in the exhibitors’ hall.
Minorities, he said, were tired of being told they were victims and were embracing Trump’s message that they could be “victorious” if they accepted his message of working hard and taking care of their families.
Gideon Raphael, BLEXIT’s regional director for the southeast, said many people did not even realize how easy it was to register and participate in elections.
Kirk: “You should find low propensity voters in your life and register them to vote”
“People have the mentality that all Democrats are for the minority community,” he said. ‘But when you look at the policies and how things are going for African Americans and other minorities… the situation has not improved in the last four years.
“So people are starting to wake up and see that Donald Trump, even though he’s a conservative white man, is actually more to them than, say, Joe Biden.”
He said his mission included explaining how easy it was to register to vote, with just a few clicks on an app, in an effort to turn “low propensity voters” into safe Trump voters in November.
In such a close race, turnout could give victory to either Biden or Trump, according to James Johnson, co-founder of the polling firm JL Partners.
“Overall, Trump has the biggest challenge – and the opportunity for a bigger prize – on his hands, as his voters tend to be less likely,” he said.
“But on the other hand, if Trump holds his 2020 vote and Biden backs down by not turning out African-American voters, then he’s in serious trouble.”
“In that scenario, and the one currently confirmed by the polls, Trump could win simply by staying put.”