If you want to understand the power Turning Point has accumulated inside Arizona Republican politics, you don’t have to speculate about secret meetings or backroom deals.
Sometimes you just have to listen to what its leaders say.
During a December 2025 conversation, Charlie Kirk and Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer were discussing Republicans who weren’t doing what the movement wanted.
Kirk described the message to those Republicans simply: “play ball or we’re going to primary you.”
Then he explained the part that matters.
If you keep threatening politicians with a primary but never actually do it, eventually they stop believing you. At some point, Kirk argued, you have to follow through or “your threats don’t hold water.”
Bowyer agreed.
That’s not a Democratic attack line. That’s not my interpretation of what Turning Point might be doing.
That’s Turning Point explaining how political leverage works.
And here in Arizona, they have built quite a bit of leverage.
Start with the scorecard
Turning Point Action maintains a scorecard for Arizona lawmakers. It chooses legislation it considers important, takes a position on that legislation and then records whether lawmakers vote the way Turning Point thinks they should.
Those votes become a score.
The organization even gives politicians labels based on those scores, ranging from “America First” and “Patriot” on the high end to “Becoming Erratic” and “Tyrant” farther down.
Here’s where things get interesting.
You might assume Turning Point simply endorses the Republicans with the highest scores.
It doesn’t.
Matt Gress has a lifetime score of 74.33 and a current 2026 score of 77.97. Turning Point PAC endorsed him anyway.
Julie Willoughby’s lifetime score is 75.37. She’s endorsed too.
Steve Montenegro, the Speaker of the Arizona House, is endorsed. So is Senate Majority Leader John Kavanagh.
In fact, on its own endorsement page, Turning Point frequently puts a link to a candidate’s TPAction score right next to the endorsement.
So clearly the score matters.
But just as clearly, the score isn’t everything.
And that may be more interesting than if Turning Point simply required every Republican to score 100.
What makes one Republican acceptable with a score in the 70s while another Republican gets threatened with a primary?
That’s a question worth asking.
What does “play ball” actually mean?
This is where I want to be careful.
There is no evidence that Turning Point calls Arizona legislators before every vote and tells them what to do. There is no evidence that every Republican who disagrees with Turning Point gets primaried. The organization’s own endorsements prove otherwise.
But think about the incentive system it has created.
A Republican legislator knows which bills Turning Point is scoring. The legislator knows the vote will become part of a public rating. The legislator knows Turning Point can endorse an opponent, mobilize activists and spend resources in Republican primaries.
And most importantly, Turning Point’s own leaders have publicly explained why they believe the threat of a primary occasionally has to be carried out.
Nobody needs to make a phone call saying, “Vote our way.”
The politician already knows the potential cost of not doing it.
That doesn’t prove control.
It does prove leverage.
There is a difference, and throughout this investigation I’m going to be very careful about it.
Now add Arizona’s independent voters
This is the part of Arizona politics that gets overlooked far too often.
As of the July 2026 registration report, Arizona had 1,523,886 registered Republicans and 1,210,510 registered Democrats.
The state also reported 1,490,185 voters in its “Other” category, separate from Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens and No Labels.
That’s 34.6 percent of Arizona’s registered electorate.
Nearly as many people as the entire Republican Party.
Arizona allows voters registered without a recognized political party to participate in a state partisan primary by choosing which recognized party’s ballot they want. But there is an extra step, particularly for voters who vote by mail: they have to request that partisan ballot. It isn’t automatically mailed to them the way it is to a registered Republican or Democrat.
The presidential preference election is different. Independents cannot simply choose a party ballot there.
Why does any of that matter?
Because the Republican primary and the November general election are not the same electorate.
An organization that becomes extremely good at identifying, motivating and turning out committed Republican primary voters can have enormous influence over who survives the primary.
Then the rest of Arizona gets its turn.
That creates a problem Republicans in this state should probably be talking about more than they are.
The candidate who can win a Republican primary is not automatically the candidate Arizona’s much larger general electorate wants.
We’ve watched that movie before.
Turning Point isn’t hiding the long game
This is another area where speculation isn’t necessary.
Turning Point Action has published its strategy.
It calls it the Red Wall.
The organization says “2026 sets the table for 2028.” It connects winning the presidency in 2028 with control of the 2030 Census and the redistricting that follows. Lose that fight, Turning Point warns, and conservatives could lose political power “for a generation.”
And Arizona isn’t some side project in that strategy.
Turning Point calls Arizona the “Statistically Most Important Swing State.”
Its plan calls for field offices, full-time community managers, door knocking, texts, phone calls and year-round relationships with voters.
Turning Point has a name for what it’s building:
“permanent conservative infrastructure.”
Those are its words, not mine.
Which brings us back to the question at the top of this article.
Who controls Arizona’s Republican Party?
I don’t think the evidence allows me to answer that by simply saying “Turning Point.”
Not yet, anyway.
Arizona Republicans still disagree with the organization. Some of the Republicans Turning Point endorses have voting records that aren’t particularly impressive by Turning Point’s own standards. Republican leaders still negotiate bipartisan deals when governing requires it.
That matters, because an investigation isn’t much of an investigation if I only show you the evidence that supports the conclusion I started with.
But we also shouldn’t ignore what’s sitting right in front of us.
Turning Point decides which legislative votes it considers important. It grades Republican lawmakers on those votes. It endorses candidates. It has a growing voter-mobilization operation. And its leaders openly discuss the need to occasionally primary Republicans so future primary threats are taken seriously.
Now it says it is building that infrastructure permanently.
Maybe “control” is the wrong word.
For now.
The better word may be leverage.
Because an organization doesn’t have to control every politician or every vote to become incredibly powerful. It only has to become powerful enough that politicians start asking themselves one question before they cross it:
What will this cost me?
That is the question we’re going to keep following.
This is Part One of a Sentah the Truth investigation into Turning Point’s growing political power.
Next: Follow the money. Who finances the Turning Point network, where does that money come from, and what do those donors want?
