So finally last night I watched my first presidential debate. (Why wait until now? Primarily because (a) I don’t have cable, and (b) the debates usually come on right around my kids’ bedtime.) And, based on the after-debate commentary I’ve heard about the other GOP debates, this was probably a good one to start with, it being higher on substance and lower on scatology. And shouting.
Still, around the hundredth time I heard Trump say the word deal, I started to wonder: what would a word cloud of the candidates’ debate performance look like? So I present here, as a public service, a visualization of the candidates’ messages from last night. (The transcript I used is here.)
Ted Cruz
I was surprised to find out that Cruz spoke the least in the debate last night: he only said about 3,578 words. They looked like this:
John Kasich
Kasich got 3,590 words in during the debate:
Rubio
Rubio managed to say 4,609 words last night.
Trump
Not surprisingly, Trump spoke the most last night with 5,002 words last night. And, although deal isn’t the biggest word in the bunch, frankly, my intuition wasn’t that far off.
Special Bonus
Last night, David Lat provided a Twitter version of my final word cloud:
Many many ever ever deals friends words words. @realDonaldTrump at #GOPDebate
— David Lat (@DavidLat) March 11, 2016
Posted by Sam Bruson on March 11, 2016 at 11:47 AM