PHOENIX—With just one day to go before the midterms last week, the prospect of a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate was looking stronger than ever. But a handful of far-right foot soldiers in Arizona weren’t taking any chances.
Federal Election Commission records show the Phoenix-based Turning Point PAC, a fundraising arm of the conservative re-education machine Turning Point USA, shelled out big bucks to send a barrage of last-minute text messages to voters. But they weren’t targeted at locals choosing between incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly and fringe conservative challenger Blake Masters in Arizona.
Instead, they were geared toward people across the country in Pennsylvania, where the contest between Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz was coming down to the wire.
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Suffice it to say, the texts—attributed to Trump acolyte and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk—flopped. Fetterman triumphed, overcoming a stroke and a rough debate performance to easily knock off the quacky TV doc whose connection to the Keystone State was always a bit murky.
The last-minute spending spree is yet another example of Arizona’s rising presence on the national stage and its bizarro politics’ influence in battleground contests across the country. But it may also offer fresh fodder to bipartisan critics who argue the Trump brand doomed viable Republican challengers in key races—or at the very least failed to deploy their resources effectively.
“Charlie Kirk was working overtime with annoying texts for Oz,” Pat Hayburn, a Havertown, Pennsylvania, voter who described himself as a moderate and received one of these messages on Monday, told The Daily Beast.
The PAC tied to Kirk, the Phoenix youth leader who has emerged as one of the nation’s premier MAGA mouthpieces, paid $250,000 to Arizona Republican Rep. Jake Hoffman’s company, 1Ten LLC, for “texting services” last Monday.
Hoffman, a Phoenix-area Republican, won his own bid for a State Senate seat on Tuesday in a landslide. His unsung company received more than $2 million to elevate Trump-endorsed Kari Lake’s gubernatorial aspirations in Arizona’s Republican primary, records show. (Lake, a hardcore conspiracy theorist with little connection to reality, remained behind but had at least some path to a victory in her own race against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs as more votes got counted.)
But Hoffman’s business had national ambitions, and Pennsylvania voters reported receiving a flood of text messages on Monday with an attached image featuring the mugs of Kirk and Oz.
The messages asked voters to cast ballots for Oz, a longtime television personality who hawked dubious medical supplements and spouted COVID nonsense. A quote attributed to Kirk falsely claimed that, under Fetterman’s leadership, “a dangerous Trans agenda is being forced on our children.”
Others reported receiving a text asking, “Do you know John Fetterman is an extreme left-wing communist?” (He isn’t.)
The hail-Mary attempt failed spectacularly, as Fetterman racked up a better than four-point margin in a state where closing aggregate polls favored Oz on Election Day. And it wasn’t just Fetterman’s supporters who found the text messages vexatious.
A Hershey, Pennsylvania, voter who identified himself only as Luke told The Daily Beast, “I deleted the text because I’m not interested.” A conservative who (falsely) believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, Luke accused Oz of being a RINO, or Republican in name only. “I can’t vote for these idiots,” he said.
But the Kirk and the Turning Point texts also roughly fit the mold of MAGA-style agitation that outgoing GOP Senator Pat Toomey has since argued helped poison the well for Oz in the state.
“We were at a time when it’s good for Republicans for the race to be about President Biden, who is not popular, whose policies have failed,” Toomey told CNN. “And instead, President Trump had to insert himself, and that changed the nature of the race and that created just too much of an obstacle.”
A spokesperson for Oz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Hoffman’s company—he declined to answer questions from The Daily Beast—missed the mark in other ways.
“Charlie Kirk and his volunteers have been sending me endless nasty text messages,” Gerald Alderfer, a former Pennsylvania resident who said he hasn’t been registered to vote in the state for seven years, told The Daily Beast. He, too, received a message from Turning Point less than 24 hours before polls opened on Tuesday, he said.
Still other Pennsylvania voters took to Twitter to lament the texts, with one writing, “I received a text message from jerkoff Charlie Kirk saying it’s important to elect Mehmet Oz.”
Immediately after results rolled in, Kirk suggested on his radio show that “the deep state” could be to blame for sabotaging Oz and to “keep an eye on this,” hinting at the bogus GOP hobbyhorse of nonexistent voter fraud. He declined to answer questions from The Daily Beast about what he meant by “deep state.”
A spokesperson, however, admitted the last-ditch effort was fruitless—and even went so far as to dismiss claims of a rigged election in the state.
“If the race had been closer, perhaps the last-minute spend could have possibly been determinative,” the Turning Point PAC spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “It was under the assumption that the race was going to be razor-tight. It wasn’t as tight as the polling predicted. It’s clear that Fetterman was the senator Pennsylvanians wanted.”
In a state where well over one-third of votes were cast early and where polling suggested only 4 percent of definite voters were undecided, the texts were not decisive in either direction. (The Turning Point spokesperson wouldn’t share how many text messages were sent.)
But given the average cost of campaign texts, 1Ten could have disseminated as many as 2.5 million such messages to voters on the eve of Election Day. According to Federal Election Commission records, the spending spree in Pennsylvania was equivalent to a huge share of every dollar the Turning Point PAC had previously sunk into the midterm general election—a little more than $600,000.
The return on investment proved less than compelling.
“It is what it is,” the Turning Point spokesperson said.
