APP Releases 2020 Post-Election Report; Shows Wokeism Creates Huge Opportunities for GOP
WASHINGTON — Today, American Principles Project (APP) released “MAGA After 2020: How the GOP Can Win Again and Save America,” which is both the definitive account of the last election and a comprehensive guide forward for the conservative movement.
APP President Terry Schilling, a coauthor of “MAGA After 2020,” released the following statement explaining the purpose and importance of the report:
“In the months since the 2020 election, numerous voices have emerged with recommendations of where the Republican Party should go from here. A few prominent (though generally unpopular) ones have suggested, without evidence, that it is in the GOP’s best interests to leave Donald Trump and the MAGA movement behind, eschewing cultural battles and instead embracing a vision for the party that closely resembles the infamous RNC ‘autopsy’ of nearly a decade ago. This would be an utter disaster.
“Rather than blindly following elite conventional wisdom, we believe Republicans would be much better served by carefully analyzing what actually happened in 2020 and drawing the appropriate lessons from it. This is the purpose of our report, and our conclusion—derived from a close study of the election results—is this: although Trump was the victim of unprecedented hostility from our country’s most powerful, leftist-dominated institutions, his attacks on Democrats’ wokeism were incredibly effective and helped broaden the party’s base.
“If the GOP hopes to win again moving forward, it must emulate Trump’s successes, not ignore or run away from them. And this is the case we plan to make to party leaders in the days ahead.”
An executive summary of the report can be found here.
The report argues that while the widespread embrace of woke ideology by left-wing institutions, including the Democratic Party, represents a dangerous threat to the country—one which was especially on display during last year’s campaign—it also offers a unique opportunity to Republicans if they are willing to take advantage of it:
“Driven by wokeism, the Left’s primary mission has become the disempowering of the ‘privileged’ and empowering of the ‘marginalized’ through the imposition of radical measures which would destroy America’s most fundamental institutions. And they increasingly seek to implement these measures via totalitarian means, mustering their immense institutional power to silence and punish their opposition.
“The relatively passive and deferential Republican politics of previous eras are simply incapable of meeting this challenge. Donald Trump intuitively recognized this and was perhaps the first major political figure to significantly confront wokeism, which is precisely why he won in 2016 and still came within 43,000 votes of winning in 2020 despite the unprecedented hostility he faced. This, if nothing else, should be a sign that the GOP’s future must involve embracing and building on the Make America Great Again movement begun by Trump, not rejecting or pivoting away from it.”
You can read the full report here.
To schedule an engagement with American Principles Project, contact Paul Dupont at (o) 202-503-2010 or pdupont@americanprinciplesproject.org.