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So, I’ve been trying to poke around further into my new favorite mystery: the GOP ground operation and what on earth is going on with it. So far, I’ve been looking back at articles I’d read on publication and rereading them, and at articles I had not read and reading them for the first time, for clues into the Trump/RNC ground game question that I’ve been discussing in recent posts. One thing I hadn’t fully grasped or perhaps had forgotten is that Turning Point USA and its chieftain Charlie Kirk had a big role in pushing for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel at the RNC. And the push seems to have been in significant measure about wanting to take over or play a bigger role in GOP field operations. So a substantial amount of the impetus for all of this appears to have originated with Turning Point and its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. So that’s one clue.
Then there’s the question that TPM Reader DK raised for us yesterday. Democrats use NGP VAN as their platform for voter contact and field operations. The app version is called MiniVAN. Republicans often use NationBuilder, which is actually a non-partisan-affiliated app, unlike NGP VAN, which is only for progressives and Democrats. DK said this:
“The GOP mostly uses NationBuilder, which is a perfectly cromulent platform. Did these SuperPACs and stuff also contract with NationBuilder? Again, if they did, then the impact on the ground game might be small. If they’ve got some kind of venture-capitalist-disruptor idea of building their own databases or whatever, then I will laugh very hard.”
So it turns out there is a new app. I’m not entirely clear what the app is called but it’s created by an outfit called Superfeed Technologies. And Superfeed is either owned or run by a guy named Tyler Bowyer, who is the COO of Turning Point. (Bowyer is also an Arizona fake elector currently facing charges in the state.) Superfeed seems to have been owned or run by several different groups of Arizona conservatives over a number of years. But now it’s at least controlled by Bowyer.
So that’s interesting.
One thing to note is that a new app doesn’t necessarily mean a new data ecosystem. My understanding is that the big player for the GOP voter file is company called DataTrust. So to go deeper into DK’s point, if you have different apps all pulling from the same voter file, the same database of voter data, the impact of using one app over another may be limited.
Whatever Superfeed’s history, Bowyer specifically seems to have been the guy who developed the app. Or it was his project. Back in February, for instance, at a Turning Point summit called “Restoring National Confidence,” Bowyer and other Turning Pointers were pitching state and local parties on porting their outreach and canvassing efforts over to the Superfeed app.
At some point in 2023, they started hitting up major right-wing funders for a $108 million plan to do GOTV work in Arizona, Wisconsin and a third state, either Georgia or Michigan. The stories seem to vary. This New Yorker article, which describes Turning Point’s current operations in Arizona, reports that back in 2021 Bowyer helped prepare a report for McDaniel about how to mobilize grassroots Republicans. But according to a Turning Point Action source quoted in the article, “Ronna was, like, See you later, and that was basically it, she didn’t take it seriously.” This anecdote comes up in a number of stories: basically, how Turning Point and Bowyer, who was then the co-chair of the RNC’s grassroots committee and a national RNC committeeman, went to McDaniel with a plan to stop losing election after election and had her shoot down the idea because she just didn’t care. As you can see, the anecdote becomes a kind of origin story for McDaniel’s eventual ouster and how Turning Point got into the GOTV business. The same source (who may well have been Bowyer himself) continued: “It was sort of, like, If they’re not going to do it, we’re going to do it. So we just started building it ourselves.”
What any of this means for the 2024 GOP ground operation I don’t know. But it at least seems clear to me, clearer than it was earlier, that the impetus for a lot of this stuff started with Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk and the folks around him. They started pushing their role as the GOP’s GOTV oversee and McDaniel’s resistance to that led to his year-long war against her which played some significant role in her eventual ouster. The biggest immediate effect of that changing of the guard, in which daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley took over, was shutting down the RNC’s GOTV and field operations and outsourcing it to outside groups, the biggest of which was Turning Point USA and its affiliated groups.
One more detail.
When Turning Point first pitched its $108 million plan to do GOTV work, it was for three states: Arizona (where they’re based), Wisconsin and Georgia. In some accounts it was Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, with more activists operating across all the swing states. The lack of specificity about Georgia or Michigan may suggest that the plan was flexible depending on who agreed to fund the plan. By late summer the list had been pared back to Arizona and Wisconsin because of limited funds, according to a Turning Point’s spokesperson. Just this evening Politico reported that Turning Point is pulling out of Wisconsin and handing its operation over to Elon Musk’s America PAC. The plan is presented as combining operations. But read the piece and that’s not quite it. As Turning Point spokesperson Andrew Kolvet put it to Politico, “with America PAC taking over many of the organization’s expenses in Wisconsin, Turning Point Action will now redirect resources toward its existing field program in Arizona and a new initiative in which the organization pays for hotel rooms for volunteers to door-knock in Wisconsin and Arizona during early voting periods.” The decision is “not only good for Wisconsin,” but allows Turning Point Action “to double down in Arizona.”
In other words, Turning Point Action, which seems to have played a major role in shaping the 2024 GOP ground game plan and was billed as the muscle to take over the work from the RNC, now seems to be down to field work in Arizona with an agreement to pay for hotel rooms in Wisconsin.
As I’ve said, let me know what you’re seeing and hearing.