The Disconnect Between Hunting and Political Reality
This Isn’t the Party of Teddy Roosevelt (and It Never Was)
This week, it’s the proposed changes to wetland easements—the “Duck Factory.” Hopefully, this is not the first time most folks have read about pushing back against the proposed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rule change surrounding wetland easements. But this article is not so much about the specifics of that rule change. There has already been excellent coverage of the issue from outlets like Outdoor Life and American Hunters & Anglers. Instead, this is about a profound need for accountability in how we got here.
Hunters need to know their history, and the older generations—mine included—have failed to tell the full story. So let me begin with a little history of the Duck Stamp Act, because it is directly connected to the current debate.
The Duck Stamp Act was passed in 1934. The stamp itself is something many of us hunters are familiar with; its impact on waterfowl populations is almost immeasurable. Species that were once on the brink of collapse now thrive, providing countless hunting opportunities across North America. This is all common knowledge to us hunters.
In 1958, the Act was amended to create the Small Wetlands Acquisition Program—the very program called into question by the Trump administration’s proposed rule change in 2026. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint explicitly called for eliminating the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s authority to purchase conservation easements under this program, arguing that the federal government should no longer acquire such interests in private land.
But that is not the most surprising part of this story. The more troubling reality is the cultural illusion that hunters have clung to for decades: the belief that Republicans have always been the party of hunting and conservation.
Here are the parts of the story that have been left out. The Duck Stamp Act was enacted in 1934 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal era—the era of some of the most ambitious social and conservation policies in our country’s history. It was championed and sponsored by progressive Democrats who were hunters themselves and who believed they had a profound responsibility to expand and preserve hunting opportunities for future generations.
When the Small Wetlands Acquisition Program was proposed in 1958, its two primary sponsors were Senator Clinton P. Anderson (D–New Mexico) and Representative Wayne N. Aspinall (D–Colorado). After all, many of us were taught that Republicans—and especially President Theodore Roosevelt—were the ones who carried hunting and conservation into the twentieth century and beyond. (More on that later.)
Then there’s Pittman-Robertson, or the “PR Fund,” one of the largest and most important federal funding sources for state wildlife agencies. It is the program so many of us have pointed to as proof that hunters are the primary funders of wildlife conservation—another claim that is far more complicated than we were led to believe, even if Pittman-Robertson remains an enormously important source of conservation funding.
That law was also born during the New Deal. It was sponsored by Democrats, championed by the progressive Democratic coalition, and its impact on wildlife conservation and hunting opportunities is immeasurable, even in 2026.
But in our hunting culture, we would never think of Democrats—and especially not New Deal progressives—as the architects of our hunting legacy. After all, President Theodore Roosevelt has long been held up as the poster child of the Republican Party and its conservation legacy.
It’s an interesting legacy, especially the part where Roosevelt was effectively driven from his own party and went on to be a founding member of the Progressive Party, a movement whose ideas helped shape the foundation of the New Deal progressives who came after him.
We’re rarely told that many Republicans of his era fiercely opposed him for breaking up monopolies, aggressively regulating big business, pushing wealth taxation, advocating limits on corporate money in politics, and using expansive executive authority to create national forests, monuments, wildlife refuges, and other public lands.
And here’s my favorite: Theodore Roosevelt became the first major presidential candidate to campaign for a national system of health insurance.
Now, try not to spit out your coffee, but aside from his views on military power, Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic agenda shares a remarkable number of themes (as in almost all of them) with modern progressives. Whether you agree with them or not, the through-line from Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” to politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is far stronger than any other form of modern political affiliation; conversely, the MAGA movement and its Project 2025 agenda are in direct opposition to these domestic-policy principles.
Furthermore, we should be skeptical of the people and organizations that have perpetuated this narrative. Many modern conservation organizations celebrate models such as South Africa’s, where everyday people like you and me are divorced from meaningful access to hunting through an almost entirely privatized system. Look at the disparity in hunting opportunity in places like Texas, where hunting access is heavily dependent on private land ownership and the ability to pay for access.
This year, I watched the Republican Party in New Hampshire celebrate legislation that, in my view, ran directly contrary to the Public Trust Doctrine by making wildlife mitigation compliance voluntary. That represented a departure from more than 150 years of legal tradition that recognizes wildlife as a public resource held in trust for all citizens rather than the property of private landowners.
I see countless social media posts this week tagging Donald Trump Jr. as “one of us” and urging him to “do the right thing.”
One of us?
I don’t know about you, but I am not a multimillionaire who hires guides and hunts private ranches. I live paycheck to paycheck. I hunt publicly accessible land, and I do the work myself. That is the reality for most hunters I know. Yet the fact that so many people view a man whose experience is so fundamentally different from our own as representative of us only underscores how deep this cultural illusion has become.
Even more concerning is the way the phrase “conservation should be bipartisan” has been weaponized. I wholeheartedly agree that conservation should transcend party politics. But for decades, the political dynamic has been one-sided.
State, federal, nonprofit, and academic wildlife professionals have naively tried to keep wildlife management above partisan politics. Yet while they avoided political messaging, the political right spent years promoting the narrative that it alone was the champion of hunters and conservation. Democrats, for their part, rarely challenged that narrative in an effective way, allowing their own party to become disconnected from much of its conservation legacy in the public imagination.
Many hunting conservation organizations have become so hollow in the name of being “bipartisan” that they are no longer willing or able to say anything meaningful when the future of hunting is genuinely at stake—ironically making them incredibly partisan. That silence is made worse by the reality that many of these organizations rely heavily on private donors whose political leanings inevitably shape boardroom priorities and institutional agendas.
As a result, many of us have carried forward a familiar political narrative around hunting: that Republicans are the party of hunters and Democrats are a threat to it. I grew up with that understanding myself. As a young hunter reading the NRA’s American Hunter in the 1980s, I found plenty that inspired my lifelong love of hunting—but I also came away with a clear sense of which political party I was supposed to trust and which one I was supposed to fear.
For a long time, I never really questioned that assumption. Like many things we learn when we are young, it simply became part of how I understood hunting, conservation, and politics. It wasn’t until I was much older that I began looking more closely at the history and asking whether the record was really as simple as I had been led to believe.
That is where things become particularly interesting: what happens when that familiar narrative is actually put to the test?
As policies emerge that, in my view, threaten pillars of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, many of these same organizations become hesitant to speak with the moral clarity the moment demands. If hunting as we know it can be dismantled in plain sight while those entrusted to defend it remain largely silent, then we have to ask whether “bipartisanship” has become a principle—or simply an excuse.
It is no wonder that, in 2026, many people on both the left and the right believe Democrats have little claim to America’s hunting heritage, despite the central role that progressive lawmakers played in building many of the institutions and funding mechanisms that hunters still rely on today.
Our failure as hunters has not simply been believing the narrative. It has been allowing it to go unchallenged. We failed to do the difficult work of influencing the political institutions that will determine whether our conservation legacy survives.
And I know many people are reading this with rage, asking, “What about the guns?”
First of all, Democrats have supposedly been coming to take my guns for all 45 years of my life. I still have my guns.
Second, I no longer believe that the modern Republican Party—one that has increasingly embraced George Orwell’s surveillance state, executive overreach, and a stronger centralized federal governement—is how I best preserve my rights as an American. John McCain was the last Republican I voted for.
In fact, the modern political narrative has become so contradictory that, following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump suggested that exercising one constitutional right could justify limiting another. Asked about the incident, Trump responded, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t.”
I find that deeply ironic. I spent decades being told that Democrats were coming for my Second Amendment rights because an overreaching federal government could never be trusted. Yet here we are, watching a Republican president argue that a citizen exercising one constitutional right can forfeit another.
That sounds remarkably similar to the kind of government the NRA spent decades warning us to fear.
I have no illusions that today’s Democratic Party is some perfect guardian of my way of life. It isn’t. In many ways, it has drifted from the hunting and conservation vision it once embraced. But I do believe that legacy is worth reclaiming, that those values are worth fighting to restore, and that it can be restored. I also find that anyone who believes 100% political alignment is either realistic or desirable is incredibly vulnerable to becoming part of a cult.
Whether hunters realize it or not, conservation in this country faces more threats than ever, and I am not just talking about the policies of the Trump administration. I am talking about the actual environmental challenges wildlife faces today. Some of those challenges are scientific, habitat-related, and climate-driven, but they all share one underlying problem: a lack of funding in a modern world to address a growing number of conservation issues.
So let’s talk about some modern Republican hunting policy. The Republican-backed solution was R3—Recruitment, Retention, and Reactivation. As someone who was a guest speaker at the very first National R3 Symposium and thought, “Maybe this can work,” let me say plainly: I believe it was a mistake.
Beginning in 2016, Senator James Risch (R–Idaho) introduced legislation to expand the use of Pittman-Robertson funds for hunter recruitment and recreational-shooting promotion, an approach subsequently advanced through Republican-sponsored House legislation.
As a result, Pittman-Robertson funds—which had traditionally been reserved for wildlife restoration, habitat management, hunter education, and other direct conservation purposes—could also be used for recruitment and marketing initiatives. Eventually, funding flowed to marketing campaigns, influencers, and hunting organizations whose messaging often reinforced an increasingly partisan political identity within hunting culture.
We stopped asking how to strengthen the public institutions and policies that made hunting possible in the first place, and instead we created an aggressively forward-facing influencer culture riddled with unvetted information, illegal activity, and the worst possible representatives of our culture at the forefront. It was a profound misstep.
At roughly the same time, we saw public support for hunting begin to decline, and I believe those trends are connected. As hunting became increasingly associated with one political ideology, extreme behavior, and inappropriate content—rather than a shared public trust and conservation ethic—we alienated many Americans who otherwise could have been allies.
The problem was never simply that we needed more hunters. We needed hunters who were willing to advocate for the kinds of public policies that had built our conservation system for nearly a century. We needed to return to the Aldo Leopolds of the world and move away from the Ted Nugents. Instead, we invested our energy in defending a political movement that, in my view, is the very threat to the future of conservation. This is the type of solution to our modern conservation challenges that the modern Republican Party has given us: you can thank them for R3.
On the flip side, meaningful conservation policies that benefit hunters and anglers have consistently been championed by Democratic lawmakers. These include: the Sport Fish Restoration Act, the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Clean Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Conservation Reserve Program, and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.
Many of these laws ultimately received enough Republican support to pass, and that is a bipartisan world I wish to live in for conservation. But despite what we have been told, it was Democratic lawmakers that were at the center of creating, sponsoring, and advancing much of the conservation framework that still protects our wildlife, fisheries, habitat, and public access today.
In today’s world of partisan identity politics, I know this argument isn’t going to land well with every reader. Some will dismiss it outright and others will avoid engaging with the facts. My challenge to those who have: don’t take my word for it.
Vet the information. Do your own research. Learn your own hunting history, and come to your own informed conclusions.
I am willing to bet on the facts.
Don’t outsource your thinking to influencers, political talking points, and nonprofit slogans. If we are honest with ourselves, those narratives helped get us here.
Our hunting heritage belongs to all of us. Take it back.
