The Republican Party is seeing a “Charlie Kirk effect,” with moderate Democrats and Independents switching party affiliation at breakneck speed.
Freshly emancipated former Dems told The Post they were horrified by the assassination of the 31-year-old podcaster last week — who they thought of as kind and reasonable — and further disgusted by the ghoulish celebration of his killing by many lefties.
Sheilfer Zepeda, a 31-year-old avocado farmer and software entrepreneur from California was among them.
“I’m switching parties to protest. I understand that the right also has certain character flaws, but it doesn’t culminate in sympathy for political violence,” he told The Post after seeing some Democrats’ jubilation over the killing.
“Attempted assassinations of presidential candidates, public executions of healthcare CEOs, and political influencers seems to be in line with what leftists want,” he said.
“After all, in revolutionary socialist doctrine, political violence is necessary and justified, which is why we see so many people trying to intellectualize these assassinations in the first place.
“I just simply cannot align with the direction things are going in.”
Christoper Elton, 56, a restaurant manager from Bucks County, Pa. told The Post Kirk’s death “definitely encouraged” him to register as a Republican last week.
“There’s more peace on the right compared to the left. And I’m almost embarrassed for voting left in my life,” he said in an interview.
“I was always more of a policy voter than party affiliated. I slowly moved toward faith and religion and Jesus and learned a lot through Charlie Kirk. He wasn’t argumentative. He brought you facts,” Elton said. “If he was wrong, he’d be the first one to say it.”
The post-assassination surge into the Republican tent has been so pronounced that even state GOPs noticed the upswing.
The rate of Republican registrations in Florida tripled in the days immediately following Kirk’s slaying.
“Since Charlie was killed we’ve been seeing about 600 new Republican voters a day,” Florida GOP chair Evan Power told The Post. “We [usually] average about 200 a day, so 600 is a much bigger number—it’s a big deal.”
“It’s one thing to be a [No-Party Affiliation] voter when it seemed like everyone was getting along, but now we’re under attack,” Power said, adding that many of his own friends went from undeclared to Republican in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder.
Crucial swing state Pennsylvania saw a similar surge after Kirk’s killing. Republican voter registration doubled that week compared to previous averages.
The Keystone State clocked 2,148 new GOPers the week ending Sept 13, compared to 1,018 the week before. Democrats, by comparison, gained a measly 400 or so voters for each of those weeks.
And it’s not just happening in red, or purple, states. Leticia Munoz of the Republican Party of New Mexico told The Post that from Wednesday — the day Kirk was killed — to Sunday, 78 Democrats approached her booth at the New Mexico state fair to change their registration to Republican.
Turning Point USA, the conservative campus youth organization founded by Kirk, saw a post-assassination surge in chapter requests, amounting to more than 15 times the organization’s existing size, according to the group.
Turning Point was flooded with over 32,000 inquiries to start new chapters in the 48 hours following Kirk’s murder, where the group had roughly 2,100 chapters before Kirk’s death.
The trend spread on social media, too, as users lighted up platforms announcing their departure from the Democrat Party. Some said the final straw had been witnessing their fellow Democrats callously and grotesquely celebrate the killings.
For example Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said in an interview with progressive outlet Zeteo: “There are a lot of people who are talking about [Kirk] just wanting to have a civil debate … These people are full of s—t and it’s important for us to call them out.”
The night of Kirk’s assassination, finance CEO Siqi Chen posted on X an old photo of himself at a Barack Obama fundraiser, writing: “My entire life I voted Democrat, donated the max to Obama, […] pulled my kid out of preschool in 2016 after Trump won because their teacher was MAGA. Voted Kamala last year. Today I registered Republican.”
Another user, whose identity was verified by The Post but declined an interview fearing violence from radical Democrats, wrote on X that night: “The assassination of Charlie Kirk is more than enough for me to change party affiliation. I am now, for the first time in my life, registered as a Republican.”
TikTok user @Charity_reacts11 kicked a hornet’s nest when she shared a video proclaiming her exit from the Democrat Party.
“I’ve been voting Democrat for 31 years, for as long as Charlie Kirk was alive,” the 49-year-old said in a video. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out … [Democrats] don’t need pronouns. They need Prozac.”
Jeanie, a middle-aged woman in Charlotte, N.C., experienced a visceral mix of excitement, righteous defiance, and abject terror when she switched her voter registration to Republican last week.
She asked that her last name be withheld because she is so frightened of potential violence from local Democrats—and social rejection from her liberal friends.
“I had to unfriend, like, 15 people on different platforms because they said Charlie Kirk had it coming to him. And I just thought, my God, evil is walking amongst us,” Jeanie told The Post.
“It was 9/11, the day after Charlie’s death. I thought: I’m making a stand. The more the left goes left, the more I find myself conservative,” she said.
Ex-Levi’s exec Jennifer Sey, too, was inspired to officially join the GOP following last week’s tragedy.
Sey, a lifelong Democrat, had been fired by the iconic clothing brand in 2022 for speaking out against COVID-19 restrictions and had since become an outspoken critic of trans-identified males in women’s sports.
“I felt like both parties have this sort of litmus test. And I didn’t want to be held to any litmus test. I just wanted to decide what I think and vote accordingly,” Sey, 55, who now lives in Colorado, told The Post.
In her women’s sports advocacy, she even started her own apparel line, XX-XY Athletics, but could never bring herself to use the label “Republican”—that is, until Wednesday.
“I want it noted. I want the record to show that people are fleeing the Democratic Party because of what they stand for right now,” she said, recalling she’d met Kirk once and that he was “kind and gracious and very tall.”
“The vibe overall on the left—and certainly most of my now ex-friends are of the left—is that they are so convinced of their own righteousness that anything is justified.”
And that now included murder, she said.