[1][2][3][4] Analyses of U.S. news stories have shown that the "pounces" phrasing is used with roughly equal frequency to refer to Republicans and Democrats, while acknowledging the difficulty of measuring the phenomenon qualitatively.
[1] Wall Street Journal editor James Freeman describes the term as a "long-running joke among right-leading media skeptics", but found little evidence to back it up.
[5] The National Post has associated the phenomenon, along with other instances of "unconscious bias" among journalists, with the decline of public trust in the mainstream news media.
[3] James Freeman discussed the construction in the context of the 2019 New York Times article "Ocasio-Cortez Team Flubs a Green New Deal Summary, and Republicans Pounce".
He observed that only limited conclusions can be drawn from simple keyword searches, writing: "What we really need to know is whether Republicans suffer more than Democrats from a general framing that focuses on the opposition response instead of the initial miscue.