Cruz More Anxious than Rubio after Christie Lashes Out at Rubio

Using my new AnalyzeThis app, I analyzed the full text of the candidates’ comments during last Saturday’s Republican Debate. The app looks for emotional keywords in six categories: Wellbeing, Anger, Spirituality, Money, Anxiety and Mortality. It computes a 1-to-10 score for each category based on the ratios of those words in the text to ratios found in a large database of sampled text. It also offers a word cloud that shows the keywords and highlights those that appeared most frequently.

Shown below is a summary of the scores for each remaining candidate and all candidates in the last three Republican debates and the last two Democratic debates. (Comments of the moderators were removed.)

As you’ll recall, Christie unleashed his inner bulldog against Rubio in the last debate for the latter’s tendency to resort to memorized 25-second fragments of his stump speech rather than answering questions directly and substantively. These results bear that out, in that Rubio’s scores for last Saturday were very consistent with his prior debate performances — i.e., he seems to play it very close to the vest in terms of the words he uses. Christie, meanwhile, tied for the largest scoring jump from one debate to the next of any candidate — a leap from 8 to 2 in Anxiety — suggesting that he’s very relaxed (while being no more angry) when in attack mode.

Carson was the other candidate with a six-point leap, but his scores are all over the map for each debate with no discernible (to me, at least) pattern.

Also notable was Cruz’s downturn in Wellbeing and upturn in Anxiety from the previous debate. It’s unclear if this was due to his lengthy defense of Carson’s charges of chicanery in the Iowa caucuses, or to his frustration at having Christie and Rubio garner much of the attention from that point forward.

Shown below for easy comparison are the Wellbeing word clouds from the last Republican (left) and Democratic (right) debates: