Candidates' speeches analyzed: negativity, LBJ comparison, Stalin comparison, and more!

Mentions of Opponents in Campaign Speeches During 1/1/2006 to 1/14/2008

Candidate Negative Mentions Per 10,000 Words - (Number of Speeches Analyzed)

Hillary Clinton 1.376 - (50)
Barack Obama 1.803 - (54)
John Edwards 6.568 - (16)

Fred Thompson 2.283 - (9)
John McCain 3.018 - (37)
Mitt Romney 8.517 - (14)

A negative mention is counted whenever a candidate mentions an opponent from either party by name or whenever he or she uses the term "opponent." We have also tried including the use of the word "Bush" as a negative mention when used by Democratic candidates. The ranking of the Democrats remains the same. These data are based on 180 speeches gathered from candidate websites. We are working on a broader analysis which uses transcripts gathered by Congressional Quarterly.

Hillary Clinton uses the word security 8.8 times per 10,000 words while Obama (who falls in the middle of the LBJ-Bill Clinton scale) uses the same word about 6.8 times per 10,000 words. Bill Clinton uses the word "know" 5 times more often than did LBJ. Hillary Clinton uses the word know 57 times per 10,000 words versus 25 times per 10,000 words for John McCain. Bill Clinton uses the word families 3 times more often than LBJ. Hillary Clinton uses the word families about 16.1 per 10,000 words versus 5.8 for Obama and 1.0 for Giuliani. Another popular Bill Clinton word is "back" which Hillary uses about twice as much as the other candidates. The word "prosperity" is used twice as often by Bill Clinton as it is used by LBJ. Hillary mentions prosperity 1.3 times per 10,000 words and Huckabee uses the word prosperity 2.3 times per 10,000 versus .71 times for Obama.

Partly for fun we rank the candidates on a Stalin versus JFK index. Words that are very JFK like include believe, threat, civil, responsibility, cooperation, provide, and effort. Words that are very Stalin like are army, enemy, Germans, defeat, enslaved, defend, brothers, and honor. Among the candidates we examine, Huckabee's words are the closest to those of Stalin while Clinton, Obama's and Edward's words are the closest to those of JFK. We should note that this is entirely a relative ranking of the candidates. It may be in an absolute sense that Huckabee's word choices are extremely far from those of Stalin. Interestingly, Huckabee frequently uses the words "red," "army" and "october" which were favorite words of Stalin. JFK used the word civil 12.5 times more than Stalin. Obama uses the word "civil" 5.8 times per 10,000 words versus 3.8 for Giuliani, .93 for Romney, and 0 times for Huckabee.