Pinsker Law of PR #83: “Intensity” and “popularity” aren’t the same thing, but if you spend most of your time online, intensity and popularity become utterly indistinguishable.
As such, you miss the forest for the trees.
Most political reporters aren’t pounding the pavement anymore, knocking on doors and buying dinner for on-the-fence sources in seedy dive bars. That era of journalism is deader than the dodo. Nowadays, reporters live, breathe, and work online; their “sources” are the voices, texts, and emails popping up on their phones.
It used to be that appearing within the physical pages of Time Magazine was a huge freaking deal, and if your story “only” appeared on Time.com, it was a disappointment. (Fun fact: So prestigious was the Time Magazine “rub” that one prominent golf resort used to display fake Time covers.) Now, the opposite is true: Nobody reads magazines, but digital is forever.
Today, the online world is king.
Brands, marketers, and celebs prefer online coverage to paper, because news stories in high-ranking media outlets spike their SEOs and/or social media activity. And reporters also prefer online, because their “clicks” and “views” are quantifiable metrics that directly correlate to their popularity and/or salary. With all sides pushing in the same direction, it’s created a digital feeding frenzy.
It helps explain why certain stories — including the torrid tale of Jeffrey Epstein — are elevated, and other stories are ignored.
Popularity matters more on Election Day, but intensity reigns online. Rage fuels social media engagement. It’s the secret to going viral.
But very often, what feeds the Rage Machine is poisonous to popularity.
And this brings us to the Democrats of 2025: A new Wall Street Journal poll showed a mind-blowing 63% of voters(!) now have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party.
Only 33% have a favorable view. They’re an astonishing 30 points underwater! These are the worst polling numbers for the Democratic Party since 1990.
Naturally, if the United States were a European-style parliamentarian government comprised of a half-a-dozen different parties, the Dems’ numbers wouldn’t be so bleak. But in a two-party system?!
That’s tantamount to suicide.
On the Republican side, Jeffrey Epstein is an example of a high-intensity issue of dubious overall popularity: Most conservatives don’t care, but a minority is obsessed. It sucks for party cohesion, but as cracks and divisions go, Epstein is survivable.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, their high-intensity, low-popularity issues are festering absolutely EVERYWHERE. You see it with the trans issue, children and gender, and fairness in women’s sports. You see it with Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. You see it with the agenda of Zohran Mamdani, radical redistribution, and his quest for Castro-styled communism.
And today?
Only 8% of voters view Democrats as “very favorably.” The GOP’s numbers are more than double that, 19%.
It’s a cautionary tale for Republicans: If you overfeed on intensity, you end up sacrificing your popularity.
Don’t go in the direction of the loudest voices — instead, go in the direction of the most voices! Never forget, American elections are an either-or proposition.
As the Wall Street Journal noted:
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.
On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress. [emphasis added]
The GOP doesn’t have to be perfect to prevail in November. They just have to be more appealing than the alternative. And the Democratic Party, in their psychotic, kneejerk hatred for all-things Trump, keeps looking uglier, nastier, and more unhinged:
In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.
Voters have significant concerns about the centerpiece of Trump’s agenda—his immigration policies—opposing some of his deportation tactics by double-digit numbers. And yet they trust congressional Republicans more than Democrats on immigration by 17 points and on handling illegal immigration by 24 points. [emphasis added]
A handful of Democrats have sounded the alarm:
“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”
During the 2018 midterms, Trump’s GOP was shellacked, losing 40 seats in the House and restoring Nancy Pelosi to the speakership. But the 2026 midterms are shaping up very differently:
At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district.
Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate—and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.
When asked how they would vote if the election were held today, more voters in the new Journal poll said they would back a Democrat for Congress over a Republican by 3 points, 46% to 43%. That is a significant advantage for the Democrats at this early stage. But at this point in 2017, the Democratic lead was 8 percentage points.
Trump’s job approval rating, at 46%, is lower than the 52% who disapprove of his performance in office. But it is meaningfully higher than the 40% approval he drew at this point in his first term. [emphasis added]
Altogether, it gives the Republican Party about a 5-point buffer, which is a REALLY big deal in a closely divided country. It just might be enough to stave off a Democratic takeover in the House.
It also raises serious questions about the future of the Democratic Party: There’s a colossal political vacuum on the liberal side of the aisle, and nobody on the left has risen to fill it.
But eventually, someone will. Because eventually, all vacuums are filled.
Liberals aren’t happy. No, they’re not so unhappy they’ll vote Republican, but they just might not vote at all. Either way, the Democratic Party is ridiculously overdue for a reckoning: (Metaphorical) heads are gonna roll, and their metamorphosis into whatever comes next will be messy, nasty, and chaotic.
When the status quo isn’t sustainable, one way or another… it goes away.
Just how it is. Nothing lasts forever.
Not even political parties.
The old Democratic Party died when the Biden administration ended. Now, something new is about to emerge.
One Last Thing: The Democrats are on the ropes, but make no mistake: The donkeys are still dangerous. 2025 will either go down in history as the year we finally Made America Great Again — or the year it all slipped through our fingers. We need your help to succeed! As a VIP member, you’ll receive exclusive access to all our family of sites (PJ Media, Townhall, RedState, twitchy, Hot Air, Bearing Arms): More stories, more videos, more content, more fun, more conservatism, more EVERYTHING! And if you CLICK HERE and use the promo code FIGHT you’ll receive a Trumpian 60% discount!
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