The Hidden Strategy That Won Every Swing State in 2024 | Tyler Bowyer DSH #1045

I love how your foot's still on the gas because just because we won doesn't mean to stop or slow down.

In fact, it's the opposite.

It's like the day after the election, we're like, okay, what's next?

I sat down with Charlie and we already crafted a plan.

We're just putting basically all the pieces into place, all the bodies in place so we can move into those places.

You look at the map, you have to have the smarts to know, okay, what is going to mess up the left the most.

Yeah.

That's what we're doing.

All right, guys, we got Tyler here today, COO of Turning Point Action.

Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, of course.

Thanks for having me on.

It's going to be a blast.

How long have you been with Turning Point?

So I met Charlie in 2014.

So

Turning Point was about a year and a half old and

very small, as you can imagine, at that point.

And came across, you know, the very few people who were trying to do stuff.

And Charlie was one of those very few.

And we had a lot of similar vision.

And that's how we synced up.

So you were one of the early ones.

Yeah, I am at this at this point.

I mean, for a long time, I've been the longest tenured employee of attorney boys.

Well done.

Yeah.

Was he as convincing as he is now back then?

Yeah.

I mean, that's the really interesting part about Charlie Kirk is that when you meet him, you come to the realization that he's got a far wider reach than even people kind of expect.

There, you know, when I met Charlie, he was, I think, still a teenager.

He might have been just

20.

And

it was very obvious at that point.

It's like, wow, this guy's a political savant.

And that's, that's the big reason part of the, it's not just that.

You know, there's a lot of smart people in politics,

but being a hard worker and wanting to actually do the right things for the right reasons.

Yes.

That's the hard part.

And yeah, you saw that leading up to the election, how hard you guys were working.

Well, I mean, There's a lot of people I always talk all the time, like back in my day, part of the reason why we, you know, I synced that with Charlie was I wanted to start my own turning point type organization at the time.

And this is years ago, this is 15 years ago.

And John McCain was huge here in the state of Arizona.

And what would happen is it was like a vacuum.

Any young person that came out of college, they just get sucked up by the establishment and they get fit into the campaign mold.

They get fit into,

you know, Capitol Hill, working on those things.

And then they just turn into like these absolutely despotic, you know, rhino-esque type figures.

and you lose the entire generation that way.

And so, what was really cool about the vision and what, you know, has been able to be created here is that there's an alternative for young people to fit in and take a different avenue that was far away from, again, that like very rhino-y establishment, hacky type stuff and actually focus on activism, which is what wins election.

I love that.

Yeah.

And you don't have to conform also.

You could just be yourself.

You can be yourself.

Yeah.

You can do whatever you want.

And that's the cool part.

It's like, you'll see around here, there's a lot lot of different people,

a lot of different viewpoints

about the conservative movement, but they're all one place.

I mean, I saw that with the speaking lineup.

I noticed a couple of them got beef with each other.

Yeah, it's, which is kind of fun.

And that's how we've kind of always operated, which is focus on the right things, focus on the things that are going to

move the movement in the right direction.

Yeah, we always have a phrase within Turning Point, our culture is the movement before me.

And that's really what we live live by here.

So, you know, you're not going to agree with everybody all the time.

You and I probably disagree about a lot of different things.

I disagree with my wife all the time on a lot of different things.

And yeah, we decided to get married many years ago.

So like, you're just going to have those situations.

That's not usually what defines us, but it is really important to focus on the things that do matter a lot and move the ball down the field.

Absolutely.

I want to talk about the strategy because you guys.

played an instrumental role in winning every single swing state this election.

So what was that locker room like a year ago?

Like, were you guys discussing what states to go off there?

Yeah.

So we're really unique.

We're, we're really the only organization that has a full-time presence in all 10 of the key target states.

So when we would get together with the handful of organizations that exist on the, on the right,

the outside organizations outside the RNC, we were one of the only ones that had staff, full-time staff in the top 10 states, which is that's that's the baseline, right?

That's like the foundation for everything.

Yeah.

And then what we did was we just strategically looked at things and we said, what are the states that we can invest most heavily into that statistically will get us across the finish line the best?

And when you look at that, the statistics, it's just statistics, right?

It's, there's a number of electoral college votes that exist.

There's only certain pathways that can come from those electoral college votes.

And it comes down to basically six states, right?

You have the six key swingable states that exist, and which one statistically mattered the most?

And that was Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, that order.

We looked at that and said, where can we make the biggest impact?

Well, obviously, we're headquartered in Arizona.

We just mentioned before we went on.

I'm from Arizona.

That's why we're in Arizona.

That's why turning points in Arizona.

That's why this event's in Arizona right now is because originally, you know, it's kind of funny, like one cross one bridge to get to another.

Charlie's from Chicago.

I'm from here.

I talked him into moving our headquarters here back when people thought this was a deep red state.

Yeah.

And we had already seen the inklings that this was heading in the wrong direction because of California, because of influence, everything else.

So, yeah, that's

where the magic is: looking smart at the statistic, the static, the statistical probability of how you win the election and then putting all your armies in those places.

Right.

And that's what we did.

And we decided to do that grow heavily in Arizona, Wisconsin.

And that allowed, I think, other groups to focus more on Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, which is really special.

Absolutely.

Did you guys expect to win every single swing state?

Because I didn't see anyone call them out, honestly.

Yeah, I mean, honest,

the honest perspective with everything is that we knew the blue wall was going to be really tough.

So Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, we had put all of our chips into Wisconsin.

So we felt really good about what we were doing, which was targeting a specific number of votes that we knew we needed to get across the finish line.

For us, we know now at this point, we made the difference with the people we were chasing.

And we call that ballot chasing, which is identifying the voters and making sure that they actually get their ballot in.

We did that in Wisconsin.

But, you know, Pennsylvania, I still think it's a crapshoot.

It's a toll toss-up state.

You know, Trump did not win by enough to claim that we have some kind of severe dominance there.

I mean, when you're within basically two percentage points of any state, that's just like people deciding not to wake up or it's snowing that day or something, right?

Could swing the election.

So we have to take that seriously moving forward is that Pennsylvania has to be fortified.

We have some great partners that we've worked with in Pennsylvania.

Our focus is going to continue to be keep doing what we're doing in Arizona, Wisconsin.

We are announcing next week, most likely next week, the other states that we're expanding into to kind of expand the map.

I hope the state I grew up in is one of them.

Which one is that?

New Jersey.

Yeah, well, maybe.

Maybe.

My wife's from New Jersey.

Oh, yeah.

Are you from North or North?

You'll have to be North.

Oh, yeah.

So my wife grew up in Sparta.

Okay.

I've been in Sussex County.

Kickstarter is Oriol, huh?

Yeah, Morristown is really huge.

And actually, there's been this last election cycle.

I don't know if you saw the numbers from Morristown, but Morris County swung significantly towards Trump, really like a lot of the state.

But when you look at really important places like Morris County in North Jersey, which is that real suburban area of New York City,

that is a great indicator for the future.

Absolutely.

We saw that in Jersey and Cali.

You saw that in Cali.

You saw that in Pennsylvania.

I mean, here in Arizona, we saw in South Phoenix.

Those are all good, sustainable things, as long as we keep doing the right things, putting enough bodies on the ground to be able to chase voters, specifically in the Hispanic community,

which means not just showing up the last month before the election, like a lot of groups do, right?

It means putting full-time people full-time, meaning now through the election in 2026, 2028, that are building real relationships that are from that neighborhood.

Yeah.

Now, you guys crushed it on social media.

Specifically, I want to talk about TikTok.

Yeah.

Cause you were getting hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

Are you worried about the ban coming up?

So there's a cool story that's behind that, which is that TikTok was kind of awful to conservatives, as you know.

I got banned.

Yeah, we got banned multiple times.

We had set up probably 10 different accounts for Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action,

all got shut down.

We had really great partners

in that space that were doing that heavily.

And the moment that the Democrats started seriously

considering shutting down TikTok, they started opening the door more to the conservatives.

And so, you know, it's without a doubt we've been

blessed because they've started realizing, oh my gosh, we need to make friends with conservatives,

which they hadn't for years.

And that's just allowed Charlie's TikTok to explode, you know, Turning Point USA, a Turning Point Action.

We have a lot of viral content that's going on there.

And people are seeing that more than they're seeing anything else.

Yeah, I mean, the views were insane.

I couldn't go a single day without seeing you guys on TikTok.

Oh, it's everywhere.

And, you know, it's really cool because it's like, I was in Chipotle yesterday and

just on my way back i was just grabbing a bite to eat back home before we had to come back super early today and i grabbed it and uh the the kid at the counter that was working it's probably his teenager uh was like saw my hat and he's like are you going to you know about amfest i'm like yeah i i know about amfest we're running it and he's like no way and i'm like you know just curious like how'd you hear about it he's like tick tock yeah 100 and so um

that's that's a future i think we have to defend ibn obviously there's some things that we need to do to make sure we defend America,

but I think TikTok has been a huge boon for the conservative movement.

Agreed.

You know, and if they wanted to shut all that down like they had before, they could.

We got to keep an eye on it, but we need to have more of that, which is really exciting.

Even though I'm banned on it right now as we speak, I don't want the platform to get banned.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think if they're willing to work together and, you know, we're allowed to put conservative principles out there, that'd be fantastic.

And, you know, to that point, I think what we're going to see is the same thing that we saw happen with Twitter and X, where a lot of people, well, there's still a ton of people like you that are banned on it.

Like I said, we have tons of, we have probably 10 accounts that are still banned

on TikTok because they just, you know, it's just, it becomes a system, right?

There's an automated system for it.

There's people that bad people that are within the ecosystem over there.

I think you're going to start seeing an unwinding of that TikTok and hopefully we can save it.

And then hopefully we can make it a really great, strong, conservative mouthpiece like we have.

And we've seen that X.

Absolutely.

Have you been following all the stuff with Congress?

Yeah, I mean, a little bit just here and there.

You mean with the

CR and the salary stuff.

It's terrible.

I mean, this is, look, I mean, I think we said it best yesterday is that there's a mandate.

You'll see all around here.

There's a bunch of confirmthemandate.com.

It was put on by Turning Point Action.

We've sent hundreds of thousands of messages to members of Congress because they should be in the mindset to approve all of Trump's cabinet nominees.

But that's just not just the cabinet nominees.

This should be: we need to give Trump the government that was mandated by the votes.

Because, you know, the beautiful part, I'm going back to the election, you know, we talked about how close Pennsylvania was, but it wasn't a close election.

We won significantly here in this state.

This was the biggest swing from 2020 to 2024 out of all the the swing states.

And there is a very clear, viable mandate after everything they did to attack Trump.

And that is not a government that's run by Mitch McConnell.

That's not a government that's run by Nancy Pelosi, right?

And all the old, old school guys.

So we've got to make sure that we are stepping in and standing in the pocket and defending the good members of Congress.

They're going to speak out, which we saw a huge reversal yesterday on the CR.

We see a lot of,

sneaky people like hiding under rocks now

who were interested in increasing their pay.

Oh, yeah.

One of them got called out pretty bad.

Huge, huge.

In fact, we've even had some people cancel speaking here.

Wow.

Because they were afraid.

Because they were afraid that they were going to get shouted off stage.

And, you know, that's the one thing I love about this type of event is we're actually bringing people together

so we can let the voice of the people be heard and heard loud on the on a on a megaphone absolutely dang i didn't know people were canceling because bats well yeah we won't name names but there may be some people that wanted to be here that didn't that are afraid of you know potentially the blowback uh you know and i also appreciate the fact that there's some that may not that want to continue to work on things right whatever um you know this is but Congress should not even be messing around with all the bad stuff happening out there.

Yeah.

I saw they were trying to block tolsi gobert's confirmation oh yeah trying to block to they're trying to block everybody i mean like look i mean you look at where we're at uh this is a real we're seeing a tug of war that's happening right now in congress uh between the good guys and the bad guys and there's the good news is is that i don't want to deflate ourselves but the good news is that we have a lot of people coming over to the good side

that are getting pushed over to the good side because they're having to make a decision.

They can't fence it.

They can't just sit there and twiddle their thumbs or, you know, let

the speaker or whatever, the majority leader make decisions on their behalf.

Trump and JD being in there and JD, who this is what I love about having a senator as a vice president, he's the president of the senate.

So he can go down there and kind of slap people around whenever he wants.

And we think he should.

We think he should spend a lot more time doing that.

I think you might see some of that.

Yeah.

JD Vance, he's really changed my opinion because at first I wasn't a fan, to be honest.

But after seeing his debate, seeing what he's done since, I think he's the right guy.

Yeah, we've gotten to know JD for a long time.

And back when he was running for Senate in Ohio,

you know, nobody really knew that much about JD and they just knew his book and, you know, the movie that was made and everything else.

Our viewpoint on JD, obviously he's young.

He's like just a little bit older than me, but he's super young.

But we were like, let's just get to know the guy.

He came down to our headquarters, okay?

Spent three days at our headquarters just hanging around talking.

This is when he was running for Senate in Ohio.

And we got to know him so well.

And every question we asked, it was like the right answer.

Wow.

We're like, we have to endorse this guy.

Nobody endorsed him at the time.

He was like 1%, 3% of the polls.

We decided to endorse him at turning point action.

And it's snowballed into him being endorsed by Trump.

And then obviously he won the Senate.

Now he's our vice president.

Crazy.

He's like, you know, I kind of joke, I shouldn't say this, but I said this on Charlie's shows, like, he's kind of like our Barack Barack Obama,

which is like, people got to know him.

He can get really celebratory.

And honestly, if we could have as activist oriented and as eloquent of an Obama type figure on our side and JD becomes that, I think that's a good thing.

I think he's got a lot more experience, obviously, being the military and everything else than Obama ever did.

So I hate that analogy, but for that standpoint, but I mean, from a political dynamo type type of a perspective,

we need more of that.

We need a deep edge.

bench we need those types of figures and i think jay need to be that guy yeah he brings that younger energy too to the party which i think was needed yeah a ton i mean he's the first millennial ever elected to vice president or president wow i didn't know that yeah he's the first millennial in office he could be very well be the first millennial president yeah i think he'd be a great president too which would be very cool yeah i think the party is in a good uh good trajectory right now oh totally yeah i mean we're we got to keep deepen the bench which is We got to keep doing our job here at Turning Point Action.

That means recruiting more people, being in more states, you know, getting more people to things like this, doing more of this, right?

Because this didn't exist.

It was kind of like gone.

And yeah, we had kind of encouraged a lot of the establishment guys 10 years ago to do more of this.

And we're just glad that we're able, we're able to do it.

Absolutely.

What's next for Turning Point Action, Matt?

Yeah, Turning Point Action is just growing.

I mean, so I ran, I was the CEO for Turning Point USA for, I don't know,

six, seven years.

We went from that.

Basically, I was asked to step over and duplicate what we had done at USA.

So, USA is a C3.

Can't be overtly political.

You can't be political at all or partisan.

So, we had to launch the C4 because we realized there was no C4s doing this work.

So, we jumped in and started realizing with the RNC not actually ballot chasing, not putting bodies out.

I served four years on the RNC as one of the younger members on the RNC, and I just got lied to over and over again by leadership saying, oh, we've got this huge field program.

Like, it didn't exist.

So, we said, you know, we're going to do it.

And hopefully donors will show up and fund it.

And I think we proved a lot this year in Arizona and Wisconsin.

We're going to be moving into at least two more states and then helping others in other states that are critical.

Let's go.

So that's what we're doing.

We're hiring.

We had about a thousand full-time staff at Turning Point Action this last election cycle.

Wow.

I mean, so.

you know, just imagine the HR nightmares that exist with having a thousand employees.

That alone is a full-time job.

But actually having people go out, chase ballots the right way, build relationships.

We want to keep people on the ground doing that work.

I love how your foot's still on the gas because just because we won doesn't mean to stop or slow down, right?

No, in fact, it's the opposite.

It's like the day after the election, we're like, okay, what's next?

What are we doing?

And we had already, I sat down with Charlie and we already had already crafted a plan of where we're going next.

So we're just putting basically all the pieces into place, all the bodies in place so we can move into those places.

I love it, man.

Because the map is the map.

So you look at the map, you have to have the smarts to know, okay, what is going to mess up the left the most?

Yeah.

And that's where we're doing.

Where can people support and keep in touch?

Yeah.

So we want everybody involved.

We own coalitions.com to get involved at the local level.

So whatever state you're in, go to coalitions.com.

You can get involved right away at Turning Point Action.

You can go to tpaction.com to get more involved.

We are going to be hiring pretty much right away for the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

So the biggest race that's on the forefront here is that we have to have a conservative majority at the Supreme Court.

Some states, they're elected.

In Wisconsin, they're elected.

That's happening in April.

So we're going to be hiring full-time people in Wisconsin.

But, you know, Arizona, all our key target states, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire,

we need everybody to step up.

Iowa, we need everybody to step up because this is going to be a big two years.

And we've got to take as much ground back from the left as we can.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Please send some help to Nevada, man.

My man, Sam Brown lost.

Oh, man.

I mean, Nevada actually is totally winnable.

And you look at the numbers,

you know, and this is where the establishment has kind of screwed up.

I mean, you look, sorry, I don't want to go into this too much, but Mitch McConnell funded all these people that he knew we would get votes from.

Yeah.

And he laid off of places that he knew he wouldn't.

So Arizona got no funding.

Wisconsin got was underfunded with Eric Hove D.

That was a Eric Hove D it is criminal what happened to Eric Hove D.

Eric Hovety had the closest margin with President Trump lost by a very small amount of money.

So he would have won with funding, maybe.

Oh, yeah.

Without a doubt, like without question.

And Brown would have.

Yeah, Kerry and Sam.

Kerry and Sam.

So Sam, Eric, and Kerry, all three should be U.S.

senators today.

I mean, Kerry should be the governor here today.

Same issue, right?

But they didn't do their job in just getting basic TV on TV for boomers.

And you look at

the data shows it.

The data shows we are losing baby boomers because the establishment's not doing their job retaining baby boomers.

We're doing our job.

Cliff's doing his job in Pennsylvania.

I'm doing my job here in Arizona.

We have the highest amount of turnout in Nevada, highest amount of turnout ever for Republicans amongst young people, especially young men.

But we're losing old men.

That's crazy.

It's crazy.

We're losing.

old people.

And so, you know, I say that when I point at everybody, I'm like, hey, you know, everyone's like, what can I do?

I'm like, hey, you can talk to more of your fellow old people, right?

Your fellow seniors.

And Gen X is the same way.

Gen X is just getting out of bed now.

They never kind of, they're dot-com boomers and they didn't really do much.

Now they're starting to get up and out.

And so we're excited about that.

We'll end off with this.

Do you think, in your opinion, it's harder to convince the older people to change their votes compared to the younger voters?

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, look.

When you look at what we call a high-propensity voter, high-propensity voters are ones that have always voted and they've always voted in the same way.

And so they feel very indignant about the types of people that they vote for and trump is is different to a lot of people who have voted the same way forever and ever that just vote for the same guy over and over and over again but i think it's been a good thing because it's helped like really break the mold because i think in 16 people were not sure 20 obviously we had people that just didn't show up in certain areas uh specifically in that senior community um 2024 has proven number one we got to we got to go out and chase we got to make sure that they do vote because this baby boomers age it's just it happens when you're old and and you're starting to retire you sometimes forget or you travel or you're visiting family or you're doing whatever right and so you just don't vote so you got to chase those votes down but then you got to also kind of convince people like hey it's not actually not as bad as whatever the left is telling you on you know cable news right or whatever they're telling you on ads on tv and people are starting to realize and starting to come to the realization that like oh i've been lied to over and over and over again and we're winning those people back but we have to win them all back and we have to make sure that they all vote.

Absolutely.

Tyler, thanks for coming on.

We'll link everything below.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for all the work that you do.

Absolutely.

Huge reach.

Yep.

Thanks, guys.