EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Kirk’s death shouldn’t stop the valuable tactics he used
Charlie Kirk’s clips of him debating liberals on campus may have garnered millions of views a pop, but Turning Point USA first thrived through hard, on-the-ground organizing. While there is no shortage of young conservatives who hope to grow as “influencers” by posting outrageous takes or living on X, Kirk’s lessons from the early days of building TPUSA hold true today.
The lessons are these: organizations are built from the ground up by starting with something, no matter how simple or rudimentary. Most nascent groups do not have large marketing budgets or name recognition, so it takes personal conversations and authenticity to grow. While social media success can help grow an organization, it rarely comes before a dedicated following on the ground.
If you were to go to a Turning Point USA open house in the early days or seen a table on campus, you would have just a few materials to choose from. A couple of booklets about student loans and Obamacare, a few posters, and some pamphlets from other conservative groups would have been your only options.
A clipboard would be waiting there for you to sign up with your name and email. I know because I went to Turning Point’s open house in 2013, just a year after Kirk started the group. I also helped write some of the early booklets, like “Game of Loans” and worked setting up campus chapters from 2015 to 2016 before holding a different role.
Going to campuses involved the same simple fare.
Every day you would pack up your folding table, boxes of “Big Government Sucks” buttons, and “Healthcare Games,” booklets and drive to a campus, hoping not to be removed by university police. You would try to rope students in by using some relevant political issue, like efforts to regulate Uber or tax Netflix. Working at university in Chicago, there was always some dumb big government scheme to talk about.
The goal was to sign up 25 students a day, or 125 per week. Sometimes voter registration goals were also added. The work was difficult but could also be fun. Charlie Kirk would say “we’re a battle tank, not a think tank” or “early to bed, early to rise, work like [heck] and organize.”
That on the ground organizing and miles of driving that killed many a field director’s car may not be seen now more than a decade later. For most of Gen Z, they just would see the clips of Charlie Kirk debating large crowds on campus. That might be why they think you make it by posting quick videos with flashy captions all to appease the almighty Algorithm.
But behind Kirk’s success was years of building up the organization through successes and pitfalls. Through trial and error. By finding a way to explain an economic concept to a 19-year-old in a way they would understand. By bringing together like-minded individuals and giving them groups on campus to meet and debate.
There was simply no mass of conservatives waiting to engage with content while standing outside Northwestern University or in the middle of University of Illinois-Chicago. The only way to attract people was catchy, but simple messaging, provided in earnest.
Those lessons were true 11 years ago, three years ago, one year ago, and today.
