Callista and I spent the last part of this week in Palm Beach, Fla. with the America First Policy Institute.
As you can imagine, it was one of the most celebratory policy summits we have ever attended.
For those who are unfamiliar, AFPI arose after President Donald J. Trump’s first term and is made up of many of his former top administration officials and supporters. Its leadership includes Brooke Rollins, Linda McMahon, Larry Kudlow, Chad Wolf, and other patriotic Americans who served with or supported President Trump.
For the last four years, AFPI’s mission has simply been to study and advance policies which put America first.
As its mission statement makes clear: “[AFPI’s] guiding principles are liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.”
As we spent Wednesday morning through Thursday evening hearing from AFPI’s top economists, analysts, organizers, and allies, the totality of its accomplishments was amazing.
AFPI’s work will be essential to the second Trump administration. Many of the new ideas and efforts we are going to see will have come directly from the work AFPI has been doing.
And it hasn’t all been policy research and development. AFPI’s advocacy arm, America First Works, spent months crisscrossing the nation to reach the American people directly.
AFW Executive Director Ashley Hayek shared with me some of the group’s achievements, and they are astounding.
During and leading up to the 2024 campaign, her team focused on reaching non-voters and those who were unlikely to vote. They assembled a team of 3,500 paid canvassers and visited 5.7 million voters in 47 counties in the seven battleground states.
I have been a part of many campaigns: This was a tremendous ground effort.
The work clearly paid off. According to AFW’s numbers, the group turned out 606,733 unlikely and low propensity battleground state voters in early voting and mail-in ballot alone. They registered 38,000 people with a veteran affiliation in Arizona and Georgia.
In addition to the ground game, AFW sent more than 29 million text messages to voters. When voters responded, AFW volunteers wrote back and talked with them. That makes a huge difference. Volunteers also made more than 530,000 calls to voters who had requested mail-in ballots but had not returned them – and voters who did not vote in 2020.
Through all this, AFW created a data infrastructure which collected information and shared it with dozens of other conservative organizations.
This sort of cooperation is unusual in a presidential campaign. All too often, advocacy groups are protective of their information and put their own prestige above the goal of winning the election.
Instead, AFW worked with almost 100 other groups and focused on supporting President Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.
After this week, it’s clear to me that America First Policy Institute and America First Works were crucial to electing President Trump and ensuring a safe, prosperous, and free future for America.
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