When Katie Miller wanted to dismiss a content creator from the Democratic Party on Wednesday night, she reached for a mental health statistic — but data and health experts say the underlying research doesn’t support her claims.
The conservative podcast host and former Trump administration official told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that the Democratic Party’s social media jab at her husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, was “violent political rhetoric” that “is the same violent political rhetoric that is leading people to shooting up, whether it be the White House Correspondents’ Dinner or President Trump in Butler [Pennsylvania].”
“What remains to be seen is this is an anonymous account, and it is run actually by a sad liberal woman named Paulina,” Miller continued, referring to Paulina Mangubat, who works as a senior content creator at the Democratic National Committee, according to LinkedIn. “[This] is why Pew says 50% of liberal women at some time have identified that they have a mental health disorder. And she is certainly one of them. What a sad state for the pathetic Democrat party.”
Miller was responding to an online feud that began when her husband commented on a DNC tweet supporting Texas state Rep. James Talarico. Stephen Miller wrote, “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate,” misidentifying the cisgender male candidate. Following a wave of GOP attacks on Talarico, the DNC’s official account fired back, “shut up you ugly fuck.”
The DNC declined to comment to HuffPost on the matter. The DNC has multiple people managing its social media accounts, and it’s unclear why Miller singled out Mangubat. However, Mangubat appeared to admit Thursday to posting the message and doubled down on the sentiment. Miller did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Was the DNC’s post ‘violent political rhetoric’?
“The DNC post itself likely falls more into the category of snark, mockery and online political trolling than direct violent rhetoric,” Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and culture commentator, told HuffPost. “But I do think we’re living in a culture where political language has become emotionally charged, personalized and psychologically framed, and that escalation carries consequences across the board.”
Despite the political divide across the country, neither side supports political violence, according to the Polarization Research Lab. There is bipartisan rejection of political rhetoric and violence, with fewer than 4% of Americans supporting any crimes like assault or arson against political opponents.
Violent online rhetoric targeting U.S. public officials has increased significantly between 2021 and 2025, according to an Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysis published in February. The analysis also found that Republicans received 33% more violent threats than Democrats on platforms like X, Blueky, YouTube and online forums, with about 47% of that content targeting President Donald Trump specifically. Spikes in this type of language targeting public officials usually correlate with real-world events unfolding — especially if those officials become the focal point of the stories, ISD reported.
“It’s important to avoid casually equating rude social media commentary with actual incitement,” Alpert said. “Those are different things. At the same time, dismissing the broader climate of political dehumanization would also be a mistake.” Alpert also emphasized that there is a recurring tendency to portray political opponents not just as wrong, “but as dangerous, evil, mentally unwell.”
Are liberal women the most depressed?
Miller sources the Pew Research Center for her statistic. But the statistic Miller cited specifically refers to white liberal women between the ages of 18 and 29 — not liberal women broadly — and measures whether a doctor has ever diagnosed them with a mental health condition. The Pew survey, conducted in March 2020, found that 56.3% of white liberal women in that age group answered yes when asked if a doctor had ever diagnosed them with a mental health condition. Pew never published a report or analysis based on this question, which was buried in a survey primarily focused on COVID-19.
According to the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, Zach Goldberg, a research faculty member at Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics, is commonly cited as the source of the Pew survey findings. He posted a screenshot of the results in April 2020, and that has since been referenced in multiple conservative outlets, including The Free Press and The Washington Times.
“Ms. Miller is almost certainly referencing the March 2020 Pew poll,” Goldberg told HuffPost. “Diagnosis rates alone do not necessarily establish that one group has poorer mental health than another. Differences in help-seeking behavior, willingness to discuss mental health problems, access to care, or the likelihood of receiving a diagnosis could also contribute to differences in reported diagnoses.”
In the X thread Goldberg posted in April 2020, he also notes that he did not analyze Pew’s findings “to mock white liberals” but thought the topic of the disproportionate rates of mental illnesses should be studied further and “may shed light on attitudinal differences towards various social policies.”
More people who identify as conservative have self-reported being happier than people who identify as liberal since at least 1972, when the first General Social Survey reported the findings, Pew Research reported. Recently, young conservative women were found to be three times as likely to report being very satisfied with their lives, compared with young liberal women, according to the 2024 American Family Survey. These surveys, however, do not investigate each respondent’s psychological characteristics or lifestyles, both of which can factor into their answers.
A 2025 Tufts University study found that when conservatives were asked to rate their “mood” rather than their “mental health,” the gap between liberals and conservatives disappeared entirely — suggesting conservatives may inflate mental health self-ratings due to stigma around the term.
The reasoning behind why this happiness gap might exist varies. According to a 2008 New York University study, it could be because “the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.” It may even be unrelated to politics: Conservatives also self-report prioritizing family, faith and community, according to a 2021 YouGov survey for the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institution.
Experts have emphasized that mental illness cannot be immediately associated with a threat of violence — a distinction Miller did not make during her Fox News appearance when she cited the statistic. Conservatives are also more likely to hold these negative attitudes against people who have mental illness, according to a 2016 University of Florida study.
Overall, the data Miller referenced does not support her claims. While the statistic was used to characterize a political opponent’s mental stability, the underlying research measures an entirely different set of variables. It primarily seems to reflect the disparities in who seeks healthcare evaluations in the U.S., rather than serve as an explanation for real-world threats or political violence.
