Trump’s Turnout Mastermind Panics: ‘We Need More’
Charlie Kirk, who has assumed an outsized presence in the Republican camp over the past few weeks, begged MAGA fans to vote Tuesday afternoon as he worried over turnout.
Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
One of Donald Trump’s most rabid online supporters put out a quasi-hysterical plea for voters to head to the polls Tuesday afternoon over concerns turnout may be set to “flatline.”
“Turnout is mixed and not where we want it to be. We need more people to vote,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point Action and a stalwart younger voice of the Republican Party, posted to X.
“Text everyone you know. Make more noise. We need more,” he added.
Kicking off a later livestream on Rumble, sanguinely titled “Judgment Day,” Kirk further lamented “a lot of ambiguity” about how the vote might shape up in the ensuing hours, imploring voters in Pennsylvania to email in “if you have any clarity on what’s happening” in the crucial swing state.
“Empty your phone—text everyone you know who’s not a lib, text every single one of your friends and ask them: Have you voted, have you voted, have you voted?” he later added. “This thing is gonna be really tight, it’s gonna be really close. The work you do in the next few hours is gonna be really important.”
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At 31, Kirk, who has previously defended the Trump supporters who besieged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, has assumed an outsized presence in the Republican camp over the past few weeks as part of the GOP’s drive to mobilize young male voters.
Those efforts have been partly carried out through Kirk’s “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” which has seen him make stops at liberal-leaning colleges across the U.S. to hold court on campus with students on a variety of hot-button election issues, most recently accompanied by one-time Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.
Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, has also been instrumental in pitching Republican candidates to citizens in key states like Arizona and Wisconsin, so much so that the group has taken to describing itself as “an official arm of the Trump campaign,” according to the Associated Press.
An evangelical Christian, Kirk’s rhetoric often focuses on the perceived threat to traditional values supposedly posed by the Harris campaign, having previously described the Democratic Party as “stand[ing] for everything God hates” and casting the vote as a “spiritual battle” between good and evil.
He has also routinely backed Trump’s roundly debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election and has pushed further unsubstantiated claims of electoral abuse ahead of now-ongoing polls.
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