Here’s a hypothetical that, oh, pretty much everyone can relate to: You’ve just shut the door on a tumultuous, chaotic, messy relationship. (Doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship: Could be an intense, demanding friendship or even trauma-bonding in the workplace.) It was one of those exhausting situations where your brain, heart, and soul felt like punching bags.

But now it’s over.

How do you feel?

Your answer, of course, is time-dependent.

The first 50 to 100 days post-breakup are kind of a blur. Your emotions are all over the place. Sure, you’re experiencing a palpable sense of relief — like a giant weight has been lifted from your shoulders — but you still might find moments of regret. Despite yourself, you may even catch yourself defending your ex to others!

Love and loyalty are powerful emotions. Once earned, they don’t just turn off. There’s usually a lag between the verdict of your brain and the release of your heart.

But once you hit the 100-day mark, your equilibrium (mostly) returns. At this point, enough distance has passed; you can now recognize the old relationship for what it was.

And for what it wasn’t.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to date again. Sometimes, you need more time to lick your wounds and/or learn from your mistakes before diving back into the dating pool. But either way, after 100 days, you’ve been able to be honest with yourself about the reality of your old relationship. Time has (somewhat) numbed the pain; you were able to lower your defenses, have a heart-to-heart with your brain, and recognize the truth.

And now, when people ask you about your old relationship, you’re not inadvertently defending that lousy, no-good, piece of [EXPLETIVE] ex of yours! Instead, you’re saying things like, “I can’t believe I put up with all that garbage for so long! Holy moly, I must’ve been crazy!”

This brings us to today: It’s now been a little over 100 days since the election (110 days, in fact). The American people needed time to process what happened: President Biden was “as sharp as a tack” — right until he melted on national TV. From then on, it got progressively weirder: Assassination attempts, immigrants eating cats, french fries, garbage trucks, Nazis, inflation, fascism, and “the last election in American history!”

Can’t really blame the voters for needing a moment to catch their breath. That’s a lot to process.

Politics is the business of winning hearts and minds. For your party to succeed, you need to recognize how your target audience processes information, and this means knowing the right questions to ask.

Tomorrow, ex-Clinton pollster Mark Penn will be releasing new polling data that will show that the “Democratic Party is falling off a cliff.”

The big headline is this: 57% of the American people think Donald Trump is out-performing Joe Biden.

Forget about any other polling data that the mainstream media cites — ones about Trump’s approval rating, or public support for his Ukraine policy. That’s not what matters domestically. As Penn described it:

I think you’re seeing a retrospective assessment of Biden and the direction the Democratic Party was going. It’s really a lot more negative than it was on Election Day. And they’re looking at the contrast on immigration, on economic policy, on some of the social policies, and boy, they’re reevaluating — and the Democratic Party — I have never seen anything like this. This is a record low for the Democratic Party in terms of favorability. It has fallen, really, way down, and I don’t think there’s any leadership right now that’s gonna be able to bring that back.

American politics is like marriage: You’ve gotta make binary choices. It’s either yes or no. You’re either in or out.

Over the next four years, Trump’s approval rating will almost certainly be volatile. (His personality is volatile.) Sometimes, he’ll hit a homerun and it’ll pop up. Other times, he’ll overdo it and annoy the voters. But that’s not the metric that matters.

Do you wanna be with Trump? Or do you wanna go back to the Democrats?

Everything else is background noise.

So please be patient with the American people. I know it’s taken them a while to see the light, but look, they just got out of a (really) bad relationship. 

Here’s Mark Penn’s segment on “The Ingraham Angle”: