A year after Charlie Kirk’s death, his movement points to J. D. Vance as Trump’s political successor

An empty chair at the American Airlines Center recalled Charlie Kirk on Wednesday during the first Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas. “Charlie! Charlie!” thousands of attendees chanted as President Donald Trump hailed the slain conservative activist as a martyr and urged his followers to honor his legacy at the polls in November. Kirk’s figure and the movement he led were thrust back to the center of the Republican political scene a year after his murder.

“A left-wing extremist killed my great friend and conservative voice, Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk told the truth,” Trump said in a lengthy speech closing the convention’s first day, called to rally the Republican Party ahead of the November elections, in which control of Congress is at stake.

“What shocked millions of Americans was not only the fact that Charlie was murdered, as bad as it was, but also how many people made an excuse for it or cheered for it,” the president added. “Now those same people are trying to get power over you in this election, and they’re all voting Democrat. You cannot let that happen.”

Kirk’s movement goes beyond what took place at the American Airlines Center on Wednesday night. His successors at Turning Point USA have advanced plans the founder had prepared several months before the attack that ended his life at an event at a Utah university one year ago. The conservative activist had set his sights on the 2028 presidential race shortly after Donald Trump’s most recent electoral victory. His goal: to have JD Vance succeed in the White House.

Turning Point USA’s operations chief, Tyler Bowyer, told The Washington Post that, just hours after the 2024 election results, he and Kirk began drafting a plan. They identified Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire as key states in a strategy to boost Vance in the 2028 Republican primaries. The 31-year-old conservative activist died months later when he was shot during a debate with students at Utah Valley University. But the movement he founded in 2012, which is seen as having served as a bridge between young voters and Trump, has carried on his mission.

Turning Point USA is still waiting for potential Republican presidential hopefuls to formally announce their bids. But broad support for Vance is widely expected. Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, publicly backed a possible candidacy from the current vice president in December last year. “We’re going to get my husband’s friend J.D. Vance elected for ’48 [sic] in the most resounding way possible,” she said at Turning Point USA’s first major event after the murder.

Vance’s closeness to the Kirks was well known, but it was especially evident when he and his wife, Usha Vance, were by Erika’s side immediately after the attack. In those days, Vance recounted in a long social media post how he first contacted Charlie Kirk. The activist sent him a direct message on what was then Twitter in 2017 after seeing him on former conservative host Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News. Years later, in 2021, Kirk was one of the first people Vance called when he was considering a Senate run. Both were initially hesitant, but ultimately aligned with Trump.

Amid a political climate in which young voters have soured on Trump, one Republican challenge is to stem discontent over a war that so far shows no signs of ending with Iran, as well as rising costs that hit household budgets, such as higher gasoline prices. That sentiment was captured in May by Politico in interviews with leaders of Turning Point USA’s college chapters.

That has partly resulted in some of those young people not feeling, for now, a strong inclination toward Vance. In the last presidential election, while Democrat Kamala Harris won the young vote with 52%, Trump captured a larger share, 46%, than he did in the contest against Joe Biden. In 2020 he received 36% support among voters ages 18 to 29, according to an analysis by the Tufts Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement using AP VoteCast survey data.

Ahead of this November’s midterm elections, Turning Point has bolstered its teams in some of the states Kirk had outlined before his death, such as Nevada and New Hampshire. It has also done so in Iowa. Bowyer, the organization’s operations chief, believes Vance could close the gap between young people who still back Kirk’s conservative ideas and Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

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