What's in a word? Candidate language in the first Trump Biden debate

 

So much focus of the analysis of the Trump Biden debate was on how the candidates appeared or how they performed and very little analysis has been given to what they said or the words they chose to use. While fact checkers noted that the content of what the two candidates said varied in terms of how truthful they were, what also becomes interesting is to look at the words two candidates chose to use and what it says about their two campaigns.

            Eight years ago, I did an analysis of the acceptance speeches by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the respective Democratic and  Republican National Conventions.

            What I found was that Hillary Clinton spoke at an approximate thirteenth or college-level vocabulary. A high percentage of her words were polysyllabic . A high percentage of her words were conceptual as opposed to effective or feeling.

            For Trump, he spoke at a seventh grade level, with few polysyllabic words and with terms that were more effective or emotive.

            One could not have found a greater contrast between the two candidates in terms of the words they chose to use.

            The first Biden Trump presidential debate produced a transcript of the words they chose to use. I analyzed their comments, producing word clouds for each.   For Donald Trump his top four words were country, border, history, and money. For Biden, his top four were idea, number, president and fact. Clearly the two chose to emphasize different words in their speech, reflecting different themes. In fact, of the ten most frequent words each of them used only the words country, history, and president repeated for both of them.

            When it came to Donald Trump in his debate, he spoke 8170 words. His average sentence was 11.2 words.  Of those words 11% or 902 or polysyllabic. Additionally, 65% or 5345 were monosyllabic. According to the Dale-Chali readability index, Trump spoke at a 7.8 grade level.

            For Joe Biden. He spoke a total of 6896 words. His average sentence was 14 words long. Of the words he spoke 64.7%  were monosyllabic, with  10.9% or 755 or polysyllabic. He spoke at an eighth grade level.

            In many ways, Trump and Biden chose different words, but spoke roughly at the same level of readability or intelligibility. This is in sharp contrast to Clinton versus Trump eight years earlier.

            What might we make of this convergence in terms of readability?  Both candidates aimed their comments at a small cluster of 150,000 to 200,000 voters who may not be paying a lot of attention to the election. They are pitched at a level roughly where many newspapers and new shows are. They spoke at a level aimed to maximize viewer cognition or ability to understand their terms and concepts.  Of course, they way they delivered their words and the meaning those words conveyed  also are important.  But together they all speak to why words matter.