Exclusive — ‘Light the Flame’: Turning Point Action Seeks ‘Bum-Rush Running Start’ for Trump, GOP at Detroit ‘People’s Convention’ One Month Before RNC

DETROIT, Michigan — Top America First Republicans and conservatives are set to descend this weekend on the biggest city here, Detroit, in one of the nation’s top battleground states, Michigan, a month out from the Republican National Convention in nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The effort, organized by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, represents a massive gathering of top allies of former President Donald Trump on the precipice of Trump formally winning the GOP nomination for president for the third straight presidential election, as well as the next stage of the broader American right’s efforts to course correct from 2020 and win states like this one in November this year.

“We’re like wanting to light the flame here before the RNC convention,” Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer (COO) of Turning Point Action, told Breitbart News in a phone interview ahead of the event. “Usually, after the Fourth of July and the RNC convention, that’s when people start getting out of their seats. Our hope is we give ourselves an absolute bum-rush running start here so that by the time the RNC convention is happening people are like ‘Oh we’re already moving, we’re already working, we’re already there.’ That’s what we are already doing in Wisconsin and now adding Michigan to that column just puts even more pressure on the left.”

Earlier this year in Las Vegas, Nevada, Turning Point Action launched a broad effort to “Chase the Vote,” whereby, as Breitbart News reported from on-site. that the group would lead a coalition of other conservative organizations and grassroots and elections officials from battleground counties nationwide in a push to identify likely Republican voters who did not vote in recent elections and make sure they do this time.

“Obviously there are key states that matter the most,” Bowyer said. “There are six that most influence the presidential election, and Michigan is in the top three or top four in that space. If you look at the top five, it’s really Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. So, we wanted to make sure we did something that was accessible to everybody, because the RNC convention is not. That’s not a dig at the RNC, it’s just a fact is that you have to be a kind of an insider to show up at the RNC stuff. So we wanted to do something called the People’s Convention to make, number one, an impact on the most important areas in the entire country that’s going to determine the fate of western civilization as we know it. Two, is we wanted to make it accessible to everybody, so everybody can come and participate, and we’re going to be doing something that’s a lot of fun. You’ve seen the stages, they’ve been incredible, that we’ve put people on. But it’s more than that. We’re going to host a hundred trainings—individualized trainings—while we’re there, which I think is really unique.”

The “Chase the Vote” effort began in three battleground states—Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—because the undertaking was so huge and those three states were identified as the best shots for Republicans to take electoral votes back from Democrat President Joe Biden this year. The effort has been so successful, Bowyer told Breitbart News, that combined with other external events and developments in the presidential race, the Turning Point Action folks are confident enough now in Georgia being back in the Trump column that they’re expanding the push now to Michigan.

“Right, exactly, the pendulum is swinging in Georgia and they don’t have a Senate race like they have had to take advantage of in years past in a way,” Bowyer said. “So, you’ve got opportunity here in Michigan to now with the working class and the regular man who’s really pissed and really upset and again you’ve got this unique situation where if there’s this one congressional district that you really can make this big impact in and again I bring up CD7 because [Elissa] Slotkin has vacated that to run for Senate. That’s an opportunity. You don’t even have to win that congressional race, but if you add an extra 10 or 20 thousand votes in that congressional race, that’s huge, right. That’s our impact. We want to be in Detroit. We want to be in Michigan. We want to train more people to add a few thousand votes here and there in each of these areas and each of these legislative races and congressional races so potentially you pull off a big upset and a big win, which in the eyes of the Democrats it would be a huge upset for us to pull off a win in Michigan.”

If Trump holds everything he won in 2020, he’d start with 235 electoral votes. Flipping back Georgia would put him at 251 electoral votes, and if he flips Arizona back too, he is then on the precipice of the presidency again with 262 electoral votes. Taking back Nebraska’s second district, which Biden flipped in 2020, would put Trump at 263 electoral votes. Then if Trump wins any of the following states combined with the aforementioned electoral votes he is president again: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Minnesota. If Trump gets Nevada plus the aforementioned states of everything he had in 2020 plus Nebraska’s second district, Arizona, and Georgia back, Trump would deny Biden the presidency by getting to 269 electoral votes and causing, at worst for himself, a tie.

“Yeah, I mean look, you’ve got congressional district 7, which has been abandoned by the Democrats who are running Slotkin for the senate, and there’s a real opportunity in a vacant and competitive district like CD7 to not just flip a seat but flip a state,” Bowyer said. “You flip a seat, you flip the state in Michigan. So, for us, Georgia has become more clearly and hopefully in our column. We hope it stays that way, which is great.”

Michigan has been trending back Trump’s way per public polling in recent months, suggesting this state is very much in play, thanks in large part to Biden’s failures as president. In an average of Michigan polls this cycle compiled by FiveThirtyEight, Trump actually leads Biden by a half a percent. What’s more, Biden’s problems with young voters and Muslim voters appear particularly dangerous for the incumbent president here, as a leftist effort to vote “uncommitted”—against Biden—in the Democrat primary was far-and-away more successful than organizers had dreamed it might be. Biden’s immigration and trade failures, and perhaps most importantly his work against American auto workers on behalf of electric vehicles, have deeply perturbed working class voters here too. But the broader sense of this latest gathering, combined with the upcoming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in just a few weeks, suggest the right is getting, in Bowyer’s words, “deathly serious” about actually winning this upcoming election.

“The entire center-right movement—it doesn’t matter where you hail from—has to take everything from this point as deathly seriously as we possibly can,” Bowyer said. “If it’s not a win for us, we’re not just talking about the presidency but all the way down-ballot, we’re going to lose this country. This is it. The left is sinking its teeth into states like Tennessee and Idaho and Utah. They’re not slowing down. This is our opportunity to punch back as hard as humanly possible to slow that train down, and we hope the People’s Convention represents that.”

Trump, who just met with top Republicans on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, is set to address the crowd of activists gathered here in Detroit this weekend for the three-day conference on Saturday afternoon. The festivities kick off on Friday with addresses from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), businessman Vivek Ramaswamy—the one-time Trump rival for the GOP nomination before he dropped out and endorsed Trump—and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Candace Owens, the black conservative activist, will also address conference attendees. Owens, interestingly, is leading an event Thursday evening focused on her “Blexit” movement aimed at convincing black voters to ditch Democrats and join Republicans. That event’s attendees in this heavy-black city will then carry over into the People’s Convention of Turning Point Action, meaning hundreds of black conservatives will be here all weekend to see Trump and other top Republicans.

“The left can’t put a couple dozen people in a room for Joe Biden,” Bowyer told Breitbart News. “We’re going to have almost a thousand black conservatives there flexing their muscles and wanting to get involved and be involved in a big way, not just in the election but in every civic responsibility. So, that’s extraordinarily scary for the left. They’re going to be very nasty. The leftist media we expect to be very nasty, but that’s a big deal, right? When you have that many people, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of black activists in one place over-representative of the population in the country, truly, which is really incredible. It takes all the narratives off the table for the left. That’s why we’re so proud of that entire team. Pierre who runs that is incredible. And that’s a facet I expect to be overlooked purposely by the left of this week.”

On Saturday, in the lead-up to Trump’s keynote address, people like former Breitbart News executive chairman and former Trump campaign top strategist Steve Bannon—who now hosts War Room and is under fire by the radical left, who seek to imprison him—will speak. So will Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and former Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Gabbard of course left the Democrat Party over how radical her former party became. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Whatley will also speak before Trump on Saturday.

We must take our America First message into big cities across the country to win over disenfranchised Dems and independent minded voters.

President Trump will be in Detroit this weekend after a massive rally in the Bronx, with much more to come.

No city left behind! pic.twitter.com/H5SQ9s7LP7

— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) June 11, 2024

On Sunday, top conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Jack Posobiec, and James O’Keefe are set to address the crowd.

But beyond the main-stage event programming, Bowyer told Breitbart News, the main focus of this weekend’s gathering will happen outside the limelight with the nitty-gritty work of training activists how to chase ballots.

“This is really where the meat is for everything we’re doing,” Bowyer said. “We just hosted President Trump for our Chase the Vote town hall. We’re teaching everyone how to chase the vote. The right has been doing it wrong for so many decades now, where we keep acting like it’s the year 1995 and if you just win over public sentiment with independents you’re going to win. No, that’s not true. You’ve got to chase the low propensity voters. We have dozens of trainings on how to build coalitions effectively and properly, focusing on the right precincts and wards, we’re diving in and showing people how to actually organize and prepare to do the chase. That’s really a big impact. We’re bringing in all the outside organizations, so there’s literally I think two or three dozen organizations all presenting on important information, whether it’s on poll working, poll watching, or organizing ahead based on precinct, doing the impactful work on the election integrity front—all of those things are being covered in a meaningful way. So, anyone who wants to participate and not just show up and rah rah rah—which we got really good at in 2020, we did the whole rah rah thing really well, it turns out that’s not enough.”

Chasing ballots, Bowyer told Breitbart News, is identifying people who are maybe not as fired up as energetic activists but are likely to vote Republican and making sure they do so. Again, the numbers that Turning Point Action identified, as Breitbart News reported earlier this year across every battleground state if turned out to vote, would be more than enough to swing the electoral college to Trump from Biden and to well-more-than swing the U.S. Senate majority to the GOP away from Democrats, where Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) currently leads it.

“It’s identifying every voter that’s likely not to vote and then instead making sure they get turned in that’s on our side. So, the left has become really, really smart at how they target likely leftist voters who just don’t turn out,” Bowyer said. “There’s a myriad of reasons why they don’t turn out. They’re too young, they don’t care, they’re busy at school or whatever, they’re too old and can’t get to the polls, they’re working class and so they just don’t have time during the day, or they got a family and don’t have time. They focus in on these people with these reasons, and our side has just sat back and gone ‘Oh well it’s all fair game, our side has just as many issues as their side.’ They figured out if they put full-time bodies in each of these precincts, and a put a station in there permanently, they can identify who these less-likely voters are and target them and focus on them a little bit more. That’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been putting full-time bodies in Arizona and Wisconsin and we’re working with those other groups on how to do that, how to use the data and technology on how to do that. That’s what the big emphasis is on what we’re going to be doing at the People’s Convention, is hey, you’re not just leaving this to the political operatives. Every neighborhood leader, every citizen has to become a political operative to win.”