Charlie Kirk is hoping to be the William F. Buckley, Jr. of 2024. Kirk and Buckley both built from scratch unlikely conservative media/activist empires, and Kirk would now like to emulate Buckley in 1980 and send his man to the White House.

While Buckley was famous for his graceful wit and erudition, Kirk is a workaholic from the suburbs of Chicago who didn’t even bother with college, understanding it’s become a waste of time for most people of his generation.

Kirk scored a massive coup recently, taking over the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) duties for swing states for the RNC, along with some other activist groups. The Trump campaign is actually doing well these days, outraising Joe Biden's in cash. But Trump needs to spend a lot of this on legal fees and his people are notoriously bad at grassroots organizing.

Kirk, of course, has his own set of critics, who say he is just another political profiteer who can’t deliver. Not that any Republicans have distinguished themselves recently in this area.

Thirty years ago, the GOP owned the political game. We had good data, we had volunteers doing old-fashioned phone-banking and door walking; evangelical churches were coming into their own politically; and groups like GOPAC pioneered hot-button issue politics, teaming up with talk radio. Hence the 1994 GOP blow-out.

Since then, Democrats have found ways to work their traditional “street money” operations into the new social media environment.

Meanwhile Republican factions of consultants have mostly just battled each other. Some years, establishment groups backed by Mitch McConnell hoovered up all the Republican dough. Other years, consulting groups like Mitt Romney’s disastrous ORCA team ran the show. 

Sometimes they were blatantly fraudulent. Karl Rove and his protégé Ken Mehlman fought tooth and nail in 2004 to not make the campaign about John Kerry’s bogus war record or the many same-sex marriage referenda that year. Thankfully they lost out and George Bush won big. Mehlman though, convinced the national media he had done something important simply by spending a lot of money in Ohio.  A few years later, Mehlman ran the RNC into the ground, left for a cushy job at KKR, and then came out as a gay, liberal Democrat. So much for expensive Republican GOTV.

The beauty of Trump’s 2016 campaign was that it really was not about money. Using free media and Twitter, Trump dominated the politics of that year, by direct force of personality.

Right now, Pres. Trump looks poised to do the same again. He has led virtually the entire year in the polls. The rigged-up New York verdict was seen by most voters for the miscarriage of justice it was, and Joe Biden’s infirmities are now being noticed by everybody except MSNBC’s several hundred loyal viewers.

Conservatives, though, get all squirmy when things start going too well. Kind of like Rory McIlroy lining up a gimme putt. “Biden will just drop out” many pundits on the right insist. Maybe too late for that, however, as the Dems Zoom call nomination will come in a few weeks. 

Remember also, the bigshot Democrats like Mike Donilon running the campaign expect to be well paid for their efforts, win or lose. If a substitution is made -- Hillary, Michelle, etc. -- they bring their own people in for the payday.

More substantive is Shawn Fleetwood’s point about massive Democrat overperformance in special elections and the 2022 mid-terms. He is right. Democrats have been doing much better than the polls predicted in turning out their voters.

I think the reason is simple enough. They have redirected their campaign activities toward ballot harvesting, rather than rhetorical persuasion.

They know where the deep blue neighborhoods are in every town. They go there to spend millions making sure low-interest voters get a ballot, whether they want one or not.

A big part of this, as I’ve often written about, is the dark money, the ready cash handed out by Stacy Abrams and her kind, coming from left-wing or union-backed non-profit foundations.

A national poll of 2020 voters done by Rasmussen identified just how out-of-hand all this activity has gotten, highlighting that an astounding 8% of all respondents admitted to being paid for their votes. With so much outright vote buying, it’s a wonder we still have a democracy.

But the good news is, since 2020, a lot of swing state GOP legislatures have tightened up ballot laws. 2024 won’t be the free-for-all 2020’s pandemic year made things. And that 8% or so of “bought votes” looms larger in non-presidential years. The elections where there are less-motivated voters on both sides.

A presidential year for the casual voter is a lot like Christmas or Easter for the casual churchgoer. They seem to show up that one time without much prodding.

If you take a look at the last big turnout presidential year, the 2020 final polling averages, they were right-on-the-money accurate; less than a point or two on virtually every state. The many more marginal voters were swept along to actually cast a vote. The extensive GOTV efforts are not as valuable, hence, there are less polling anomalies.

All the left-wing dark money for the Democrats is also a Faustian bargain, of sorts. It requires today’s Democrat to be an anti-Semite, an enemy of Israel, a cheerleader for Iran and its proxy terror groups; an advocate for doing nothing, as millions of poor people cross our borders with impunity, hauling deadly fentanyl and trafficking kids for the sex trade into our cities. I think this is starting to turn off a lot of ordinary liberals , not just Alan Dershowitz.

That’s the American zeitgeist of 2024 and it’s going to decide the election outcome. I hope Charlie Kirk and his buddies wind up playing a helpful role in getting out the vote. But it’s much more important the millions of Americans who still care about this country simply use the common social media tools at their fingertips, to reach friends and relatives.

Keep sharing the absurdity of the Biden presidency. You can see how effective it is, as Team Biden screams loudest about cheap fakes, the humbling senior moments from Old Joe, and they keep coming. There will be some real doozies before November, so don’t neglect to pass those on whenever you can.       

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY. 

Image: Phil Roeder via Flickr