Charlie Kirk’s legacy

OPINION:

Charles J. Kirk will go down in history as the most effective political organizer in presidential politics in the past 50 years. His achievement stands out for its scale and difficulty: persuading and mobilizing a generation of voters long presumed to be the Democrats’ natural property.

To understand the measure of Charlie’s accomplishment, it helps to compare him with two of the past half-century’s most consequential organizers: Ralph Reed and David Axelrod. Each built a durable model for political mobilization. Unlike Charlie, however, each also worked with coalitions already inclined to their respective parties.

Ralph Reed and the evangelical vote

Mr. Reed burst onto the scene as the youthful executive director of the Christian Coalition in the early 1990s. His genius was recognizing that evangelicals were aligned ideologically with Republicans but had yet to become habitual voters.

Mr. Reed’s contribution was mobilization at scale. He professionalized faith-based politics and transformed diffuse evangelical discontent into a disciplined political army.

Mr. Reed helped Republicans flip the House of Representatives in the 1994 “Gingrich revolution,” providing precinct captains, voter guides and a turnout machine that gave the Republican Party its first House majority in four decades. Six years later, Mr. Reed’s networks, by then institutionalized, played a pivotal role in delivering George W. Bush the White House in 2000, particularly in swing states such as Florida.

David Axelrod and the Obama surge

If Mr. Reed was the architect of base mobilization, Mr. Axelrod was the maestro of message and data. Like Mr. Reed, Mr. Axelrod’s contribution was not persuasion but optimization, taking groups already predisposed to vote Democratic and making their participation frictionless and enthusiastic.

Mr. Axelrod’s signature moment came with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. A longtime Democratic strategist, Mr. Axelrod married soaring rhetoric with cutting-edge digital analytics.

His Obama operation perfected microtargeting, online fundraising and volunteer coordination through platforms that reached millions of new voters. The payoff was historic: a record youth turnout, overwhelming margins among Black and Hispanic voters, and decisive victories in states such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

Charlie Kirk’s ‘Turning Point’ achievement

Charlie Kirk confronted a far more formidable challenge than Mr. Axelrod or Mr. Reed. Before turning out the youth vote, he had to turn it Republican.

When Charlie founded Turning Point USA in 2012, Republicans had written off the youth vote as reliably Democratic. In 2020, President Biden carried 18- to 29-year-olds by double digits. Yet by 2024, Donald Trump had cut that margin significantly, winning an outright majority of young men and making striking gains among Hispanic and Black youths.

That seismic demographic shift didn’t happen by accident. Mr. Kirk’s genius combined Socratic persuasion with cutting-edge mobilization through a vertically integrated youth operation. His key was a sequence: normalize being young and conservative in environments long dominated by liberal groups and then industrialize turnout.

Through Turning Point USA’s more than 900 campus chapters and splashy national conferences, Charlie indeed normalized being young and conservative in environments where liberal orthodoxy once reigned unchallenged.

As his “prove me wrong” campus debates became recruitment tools, Charlie’s Turning Point Action network also built a ballot-chasing operation that rivaled Democratic field programs. Here, after Republicans’ disappointing 2020 showing, Mr. Kirk was among the first to insist that conservatives must master early voting and mail-ballot harvesting where legal.

By 2022, the Turning Point Action network was piloting such programs in Arizona, Florida and Georgia. In that midterm cycle, Turning Point Action rightly claimed credit for turning out hundreds of thousands of conservative voters, particularly in House districts that flipped the chamber to Republican control.

The impact was even clearer in 2024. With Mr. Trump back on the ballot, Charlie’s operation poured resources into youth outreach and ballot harvesting in key battlegrounds. His Arizona ground game, staffed by thousands of volunteers trained to chase ballots door to door, was decisive in carrying the state. Similar efforts in Wisconsin and Nevada narrowed margins dramatically.

Nationally, exit polls showed the Democratic advantage among young voters had shrunk to its lowest point in two decades. That was a historic break from trend lines stretching back to the Clinton years.

Why Kirk is the GOAT

The contrasts craft this history. Mr. Reed turned evangelicals into a reliable Republican bloc, but he did not have to persuade them. Mr. Axelrod unleashed the full potential of a Democratic-leaning coalition with new technology, but the coalition was already his to harvest. Mr. Kirk, by contrast, reshaped the political identity of a demographic long considered lost to conservatives and then mobilized it through modern field tactics. In short, he created and harvested a constituency.

That is why Charlie’s achievement will stand out in the political history of this era. He did not merely mobilize; he also persuaded, organized and harvested a constituency once considered out of reach. In doing so, he engineered a critical turning point in congressional and presidential politics that may define elections for decades.

This is the man — the husband, the father and the patriot — we lost to an assassin’s bullet. Our nation, our political system and our souls will all be the poorer for it. Yet, he has enriched us all.

Brother Charlie, rest in peace. We hardly knew ye.

• Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.