Conservative activist group Turning Point USA suffered an embarrassing defeat this week in a slate of elections involving a relatively obscure utilities board in Arizona.
Turning Point’s involvement in the elections for board members to oversee metropolitan Phoenix’s Salt River Project — the state’s largest public utility company and one of the largest in the nation — added an extra layer of controversy and brought national attention to local elections that, otherwise, may have centered solely on residents’ concerns about rising energy costs.
TPUSA and its sister organization, Turning Point Action, expended significant resources to try to help their preferred candidates win a majority of the board’s seats — and they failed mightily.
While Turning Point-backed candidates won the presidential and vice presidential seats, a group of candidates that campaigned as the “Clean Energy Team” emerged with an 8-6 majority on the board, which has the power to regulate energy costs. As The New York Times explained, the result means “proponents of renewable power will control the utility’s policymaking for the first time.”
It’s not an encouraging result for Republicans as they head into the November midterm elections. President Donald Trump and his allies have struggled to quell growing backlash over energy costs and some of their root causes — such as the rapid development of new data centers. In this case, one of the most well-known conservative groups in America weighed in on the debate, only to see its chosen candidates take a drubbing. And the election results came on the same day voters in Wisconsin effectively rebuked Trump’s data center ambitions.
It certainly looks like the GOP is staring down a wave of energy-related backlash heading into this fall’s elections.
Turning Point leadership absurdly tried to frame the results as a smashing success, but it’s notable that even some conservatives seem skeptical of the spin. This post on X from Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin — in which the Republican called Turning Point Action’s performance a complete “botch job” — is a prime example.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.