The Democratic Debates: A Word Cloud
Explore the most used (and overused) words of each candidate who participated in the first round of the 2020 Democratic debates.
The first round of 2020 presidential election debates is now behind us. Over the course of roughly four hours, 20 hopeful Democratic candidates sermonized and moralized. Some even gave us crazy eyes.
How do you feel? What do you think? Have you found YOUR candidate? Can you name all 20 candidates? Do you even remember what every candidate said? It’s okay if you don’t; they said a lot. But that’s why I created an application to give you a visual summary of each candidate’s time at the mic.
Using transcripts provided by the Washington Post, I was able to clean up the text, count the words and turn them into everyone’s favorite type of chart: a word cloud. Then I put those clouds into an app so that me, you and anyone else could access it anytime, anywhere. Use the link above or click here to check it out.
I’ll let you do a deep dive yourself, but just in case you don’t have the time, I’ll highlight a few things that I found most interesting.
1. Forget policy! Appeal to the people!
Okay, to be fair, policy was discussed, but without a doubt, the most popular word of the night was people. Following close behind was American. It’s clear that while the issues may be what will decide this election, it’s the emotional appeal to their fellow citizens that candidates felt will give them the edge early on in this race.
2. One issue candidates?
Among a number of the less-popular candidates, it seems that single issues kept coming up. Gabbard relied heavily on her military background, Yang on his knowledge of the economy and Swalwell kept talking about this damn generation! Will this tunnel vision hurt these candidates in the long run? Only time will tell.
To be fair, the moderators did seem to favor the big names, so perhaps these little guys didn’t get to talk about all of the issues that they would’ve otherwise.
3. Men sure do love themselves.
You won’t find this view in the app (not yet, at least!), but I kept seeing “I’m” and “I’ve” come up in the clouds of the male candidates. I wondered if there was a difference between male and female candidates, so I created the above visual to check. This isn’t a statistically rigorous test, but it sure looks like the men had a lot to say about themselves and their achievements.
4. Warren stays on-brand.
Maybe more so than any candidate, Elizabeth Warren kept using the same or similar words*. I colored words with high frequency as red and low frequency as blue. Purple shows words somewhere in the middle. Based on what I can see, Warren has more red and purple than anyone else. She knows what she’s about and she’s sticking to it. Maybe that’s why she’s been climbing in the polls as of late…
I hope you’ve enjoyed what I was able to find hidden amongst all of the pomp and circumstance of the last two nights. Take some time to play around with the app. What trends can you see?
Catch you at the polls!
*As you might’ve noticed from exploring the app yourself or just looking at the pictures, some words appear to be missing letters. This is due to a process called “stemming” which is done in text mining that removes the ends of words. This allows for the grouping of similar words (ex. play, plays, played, playing).
Additionally, feel free to revisit this app after future 2020 election debates. I plan on updating the app with additional transcripts.
