In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: sorting out the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic vote whipping saw women affixing stickers and sticky notes to places other women are likely to encounter privately: women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and the backs of tampon boxes. They all contained an appeal for the Harris-Walz ticket: “Woman to woman,” one read: “No one sees your vote at the polls! Vote for the women and girls you love!” Intimate little letters, meant to be read in secret with the promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign-season material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently took the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris-Walz video featuring Julia Roberts as narrator, saying: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen parting from her male partner to mark her ballot—and over the partition locks eyes with a second woman, about her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris and then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we gather, based on his patriotic hat) and assures him she made the right choice. She shares a private glance with the second woman as the two pat on their I Voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Canny wife assures husband she’ll vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman voting for Harris and does the same.  

These invitations to quiet rebellion tend to lack a substantive pitch, though some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. The point seems to be not persuading conservative women, but rather providing permission to women who are privately liberal to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats are guessing that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris so long as they were certain their vote would be kept secret. If they’re right, they have unearthed a new source of liberal votes formerly presumed lost to the left. But that’s a big if.

[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters do not understand]

Conservatives have been predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out [my wife] was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” the Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on air. “I think it’s so gross,” the right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.” It is unsurprising that the same political faction obsessed with cuckoldry would see the ad through that particular lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: Implications of secrecy between spouses and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families as traditionally unified under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to account for much of the conservative backlash.  

The electoral prospects matter too, and both sides have the same interest in the votes of America’s tens of millions of married women. In this respect, conservatives have a historical advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of the 2016 electorate found that about half of validated voters (both men and women) were married, and that a majority of them—55 percent—supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute issued a report stating that 52 percent of married women had voted for Trump, compared with 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what backers of Harris’s campaign seem to hope is that some of these married women are in fact quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is a bit of evidence to that effect. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women have voted differently from their partners in secret. This is perhaps why CNN recently noted the rise of a Facebook group devoted to “wives of the deplorables,” who discuss their gradual alienation from their MAGA spouses. Prompted to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s politics in New York magazine, four women offered similar stories: Their marriage hadn’t been especially political in the beginning, but then their partner had been radicalized by right-wing media orbiting Trump. These anecdotes tease a broader phenomenon of women voters who find themselves at odds with their male partner.

The likelier scenario may be that women who have previously voted Republican are simply conservative. Marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-leaning pundits speculate that a difference in values between the married and unmarried explains the gap. “We know that marriage is simply a higher priority for people with a more conservative worldview,” Peyton Roth and Brad Wilcox wrote for AEI, adding that “marriage may push men and women to the right.” An analysis of American and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gender-linked fate,” or the notion that their fortunes are tied to those of their sex. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gender-linked fate, compared with 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

This micro-effort to get married women to support Harris is obviously  part of a much larger campaign for these voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknowable, but in an election that could be decided by minuscule margins, a secret Harris-supporting wife is a reasonable target. Traditional matrimonial advice may hold that no secrets should exist between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy preempt the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love—and the voting booth.

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.