GOP Must Start Defining Democrats, Stop Playing Defense

(Lila Kate Wirtz Butkus/Dreamstime.com)

By Jacob LaneFriday, 14 August 2026 04:25 PM EDTCurrent | Bio | Archive

Add Newsmax On Google

Print|

    A   A

Working for Richard Viguerie, the pioneer of modern political direct marketing/advertising, has taught me many things.

The most important is this: brands matter.

Every successful company or business has one.

So does every successful political candidate and movement.

Apple doesn't just sell computers. Nike doesn't just sell shoes. Patagonia doesn't just sell outdoor wear, overpriced, in this writer's humble opinion.

All of them sell an identity. Politics is no different.

The average voter doesn't spend hours or days researching party platforms. They make decisions the same way consumers do, based on trust, familiarity and how a brand makes them feel.

In other words, people vote for brands.

The Democrats have understood this and capitalized on it for decades.

They've branded Republicans as Bible-thumping extremists, notably by Barack Obama in 2008:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.

"And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

And let's not forget Hillary Clinton's famous: "Basket of Deplorables," from Sept. 9, 2016.

Democrats, and others on the left, also label conservatives, inclusive of Republicans, as "wealthy elites" who are "a threat to democracy," and politicians more interested in helping billionaires than working families.

Whether that's true or not (it's not), the point is that they've repeated those messages enough times that millions of voters associate them with the Republican Party.

Republicans, by contrast, have spent years playing defense.

Instead of defining Democrats, they've been busy responding to Democratic attacks.

In politics, that's a losing strategy, as the side that defines its opponent first always has the advantage.

Republicans have an opportunity to change that in 2026.

The GOP doesn't need millions of dollars in opposition research or focus groups to do it.

Republicans simply need to show voters who today's Democratic Party has become, starting with something as basic as patriotism.

According to a recent Gallup poll, just 14% of Democrats say they are "extremely proud" to be an American, a record low for the party. Only 26% say they display the American flag outside their homes, compared to 70% of Republicans.

Now those numbers don't describe every Democrat.

But they reinforce a growing perception that today's Democratic Party has become downright hostile to something as simple as American pride.

Then there's the push to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.

Most voters agree court-packing or term limits would undermine one of America's most important independent institutions.

Yet polling has consistently found far greater support for expanding the Court among Democrats.

In Virginia, after the state Supreme Court struck down a Democrat-backed constitutional amendment on a 10-1 gerrymandered congressional map, the same lawmakers seriously considered imposing age limits to remove the Court’s current occupants, simply because they were upset with the ruling.

Consider women's sports.

A New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79% of Americans oppose allowing biological males to compete in women's sports. Yet congressional Democrats overwhelmingly opposed legislation sponsored by Republicans tying Title IX protections to biological sex.

That's not exactly reading the room.

Republicans don't even have to work that hard to create a brand for today's Democratic Party. Increasingly, their own candidates are doing it themselves.

In Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination at the time of this writing, has embraced several radical positions including abolishing/defunding ICE, refusing to recognize Israel's basic right to exist, and supporting efforts to defund police departments and law enforcement across the country.

In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico has drawn attention for claims as ridiculous as the Bible actually permitting abortion and calling America’s southern border a "welcome mat."

In Maine, former Senate candidate Graham Platner faced scrutiny over a decades-old Nazi tattoo paying homage to the SS as well as multiple allegations of rape, all the while advocating fringe policies such as abolishing ICE and private healthcare insurance.

None of these candidates is running in the same state.

But together they reinforce a broader pattern Republicans shouldn't ignore: today's Democratic Party is comfortable nominating candidates whose views would have been considered politically toxic just a few years back.

Make no mistake, Republicans face a tough fight in 2026.

History isn't on their side since the president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections. If Republicans somehow manage to hold both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, they'll have bucked decades of political precedent.

That's why they can't afford to run another campaign built around dozens of talking points and disconnected policy debates.

Democrats, meanwhile, have a much easier sales pitch. They don't need a grand vision for America, nor do they need to defend their record. Their message is simple: we're not Donald Trump.

Republicans should not let them get away with that.

The Democratic Party should be judged on its own record, candidates and ideas.

Republicans have every opportunity to remind voters that this isn't the party of John F. Kennedy or even Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

It has become a party increasingly defined by positions that most Americans view as outside the mainstream.

If Republicans spend the next 90 days defending themselves, Democrats will happily define the election for them.

But if they consistently define today's Democratic Party by its own candidates and rhetoric, they will force Democrats to defend a brand many Americans aren't interested in buying and find downright toxic.

Nobody wins a marketing campaign by letting their competition write the advertisement.

Maybe it's time Republicans stopped letting Democrats write theirs.

https://www.newsmax.com/jacoblane/gop-obama-talarico/2026/08/14/id/1266152/

Wildfires, heat waves and blackouts exposed the green agenda’s dangerous flaws

Decades of ideology masquerading as environmental stewardship have left people less safe while doing little to help the environment

By Clare Ath Fox News

Wildfire smoke now poses top pregnancy risk, study finds

Hackensack Meridian Medical Group's Dr. Craig Basman explains a new study identifying wildfire smoke as the top pregnancy pollutant. He warns of severe health risks while providing safety guidance for expectant mothers.

This summer, secular environmentalism died in plain sight. From the choking wildfire smoke blanketing American cities to the deadly European heat wave to the crumbling power grid in New York, the evidence is piling up: decades of ideology masquerading as environmental stewardship have left people less safe while doing little to help the environment.

Start with Canada. More than 800 wildfires burned across the country this summer, and the smoke descended on over 100 million Americans from Milwaukee to Washington D.C. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney blamed the fires on climate change. But that raises an obvious question: if climate change is driving these disasters, then what exactly have decades of Canada's aggressive climate policies accomplished? By Carney's own logic, they've failed. Canadians accepted higher energy costs, more regulation, yet the forests are still burning and Americans are breathing the smoke.

Canada has been governed for years by politicians who embraced the secular environmentalist vision wholesale. Prime Minister Carney is a former U.N. special envoy on climate action. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the poster child of left-wing climate policy. Canada has had over a decade of committed "climate leadership."

20 YEARS LATER, AL GORE AND HIS DIRECTOR DEFEND THEIR CONTROVERSIAL CLIMATE MOVIE 'AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH'

Video

Yet the fires are still here, not despite secular environmentalists, but because of them. Environmental groups have blocked the very forest management practices that prevent catastrophic wildfires, opposing forest thinning, firebreaks and controlled burns on the grounds that human intervention is inherently destructive. As Andrew Hale of Advancing American Freedom put it, Canada's wildfire policies reflect the "undue influence of environmental groups who are firmly politically motivated and have divorced themselves from science and good stewardship."

The 2023 Canadian wildfires alone released nearly 480 megatonnes of carbon, roughly twice the annual emissions of global aviation. The fires this year could be even worse. Canada's purported commitment to international emissions agreements and a left-wing green agenda have all been overwhelmed by wildfire smoke, and it’s everyday ranchers, homeowners and citizens who pay the price.

But Canada isn’t the only showcase in environmentalist failure. Earlier this summer, roughly 14,000 people died in a European heat wave. But it would be wrong to say they died from heat. Vast swaths of America face similar levels of heat every summer without the death toll. The difference is in America, roughly 90% of homes have air conditioning, whereas in Europe, only about 20% do.

Video

That choice is deliberate. When asked whether Europeans should install air conditioning in response to deadly heat waves, a European Environment Agency expert told CBS News that she did not think it should be the solution anywhere, warning that installing more AC emits more heat into the environment and accelerates warming. In other words, to save lives we must let people die. Meanwhile, in a resurrection of feudalism, senior European Commission officials kept their AC running on the upper floors while it was shut off for regular staff below.

Here in America, we can look at Canadian haplessness and European hypocrisy and shake our heads. But we’re hardly immune from warming temperatures and inane political responses.

This past Fourth of July — the grand 250th birthday of our nation — Washington, D.C., hit 103 degrees for the hottest Independence Day on record. Philadelphia cancelled its parade after three consecutive days above 101. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked residents to set their thermostats to 78 degrees to protect the power grid. At least in America we have AC, but that AC won’t matter much if the grid fails — and in New York, it’s at risk of failing because of, once again, the environmentalists.

In 2021, green activists forced the closure of Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, eliminating roughly 25% of the New York City region's power supply. As expected, wind and solar could not fill such a gap, so New York began to use more natural gas. Not only did environmentalists force New York to increase emissions for no reason, they made New York’s grid highly dependent on a single fuel source and more vulnerable to demand spikes that cause grid failure. Like those in Canada and Europe, American greens value ideology over outcome.

Video

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION

The failure of secular environmentalism has one root cause: it sees people and human activities as enemies. But when human flourishing is put at the center of environmental policy and human resourcefulness is applied to the environmental problems of our day, our current crises become solvable.

With a human-centric environmentalism, Canada would have no difficulty engaging in responsible forest management that uses reason to steward the land and reduce wildfire risk. Europe could accept that the miraculous invention of air conditioning saves lives without meaningfully worsening the climate. And New York would see that the incredible advances of nuclear energy provide clean, reliable baseload power that intermittent renewables cannot match.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

There’s no reason to sacrifice people’s lives and well-being to save the planet. If anything, the opposite is true: Only people have the power to care for God’s creation and leave it better than we found it.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/wildfires-heat-waves-blackouts-exposed-green-agenda-dangerous-flaws

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/wildfires-heat-waves-blackouts-exposed-green-agenda-dangerous-flaws

Was This July Really the “Hottest Month in History”?

Was This July Really the “Hottest Month in History”?

No, but the “claim sounds scary until you read the fine print.” So, go out and enjoy your summer!

Posted by Leslie Eastman

The annual “hottest month in history” headline has arrived again, complete with demands that the public accept it as proof of an imminent climate apocalypse.

Cue the red ink and hyperbole.

July was “a wild weather month,” setting a record as the warmest month ever for the contiguous United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.

Temperatures last month averaged 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit as above-average warmth blanketed the U.S., and several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records since NOAA started keeping track in 1895.

Last month was 0.1 to 0.2 degrees warmer than July 1936 and July 2012, according to the agency. July also broke the record for the average low temperature, at 64.2 degrees, surpassing July 2022 by 0.7 degrees.

A heat wave that began in early July placed more than 185 million people under heat alerts, including residents of multiple major metropolitan areas, like Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The Independence Day parade in the nation’s capital was among several events that had to be canceled or postponed due to the extreme heat.

Meteorologist Chris Martz says this claim is misleading.

“That claim is misleading for two reasons:

 This is due to minimum temperatures only, which skew the “average.”

 The real, measured thermometer data (area-weighted) don’t support this claim.”

I would like to explore the rest of his explanation for a few moments.

The reported warming trend appears to be driven mainly by rising nighttime low temperatures. Because climate “averages” combine daytime highs and nighttime lows, warmer nights can make the overall average look higher even when daytime high temperatures do not show the same increase.

Martz argues that raw thermometer readings, which are adjusted to account for the area each station represents, do not show as much recent warming as the adjusted records suggest.

To elaborate, temperature stations measure temperatures at specific locations. If we are trying to estimate the average temperature over a wide area like the U.S. or the Globe, it is advisable to use gridding or some more complicated form of spatial interpolation to assure that our results are representative of the underlying temperature field. For example, about a third of the available global temperature stations are in U.S. If we calculated global temperatures without spatial weighting, we’d be treating the U.S. as 33% of the world’s land area rather than ~5%, and end up with a rather biased estimate of global temperatures.

NOAA adjusts older weather-station records to account for non-climate changes, such as stations moving, equipment changing, or observers recording temperatures at different times of day. Its Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm (PHA) compares a station with nearby stations to identify and correct apparent breaks in the record.

Critics argue that this process can make early temperature records look too cool and recent warming look larger than it really was. One concern is that if an urban station affected by the urban heat-island effect is used as a comparison station, some of that artificial urban warming could influence adjustments applied to nearby rural stations. A peer-reviewed study found that this type of “urban blending” can occur in homogenized data sets.

Most weather station–based global land temperature datasets currently use a process called “statistical homogenization” to reduce the amount of nonclimatic biases. However, using temperature data from two countries (Japan and the United States), we show that the homogenization process unintentionally introduces new nonclimatic biases into the data as a result of an “urban blending” problem. Urban blending arises when the homogenization process inadvertently mixes the urbanization (warming) bias of the neighboring stations into the adjustments applied to each station record. As a result, the urbanization biases of the unhomogenized temperature records are spread throughout all of the homogenized data. The net effect tends to artificially add warming to rural stations and subtract warming from urban stations until all stations have about the same amount of urbanization bias.

Martz notes that rural stations, weighted so that densely monitored areas do not dominate the results, show more pronounced warm periods in the early and middle 1900s and a less steep warming trend in recent decades. The claim is that careful time-of-observation corrections do not automatically double-count hot days; instead, their main possible effect during a warm spell may occur near its end, when a cold front rapidly lowers temperatures.

Furthermore, the actual precision of the temperature determination for this claim is questionable.

In fact, the data show that if only daytime temperatures were taken into account, this would be only the 6th-hottest July. And it turns out Alaska, omitted by considering only the “contiguous U.S.,” was in the “coolest third” over the past century.

As former climate activist Lucy Biggers notes, the “claim sounds scary until you read the fine print.” So go out and enjoy your summer.