Grammarly Presidential Candidates Study | Press Briefing
Grammarly took a lighthearted look at how well the 2016 presidential candidates’ supporters write when they’re debating online. This brief contains our data and rankings, an infographic for you to use, our methodology, and our contact information. Please attribute the study to Grammarly with a link to https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check.
Data and Ranking of Democratic Candidates (NEW Data)
Rank | Candidate | Supporters’ Mistakes per 100 Words | Poll Rank (1) | Unique Words Per 1000 Words* | Most Common | Facebook Followers |
1 | Lincoln Chafee | 3.1 | 5 | 304 | Candidate, Support, Campaign, Senator, Debate, Democratic | 9,526 |
2 | Jim Webb | 3.3 | 3 | 279 | Candidate, Senator, President, Support, Campaign, Flag | 31,276 |
3 | Bernie Sanders | 3.7 | 2 | 302 | Campaign, Support, Issue, Job, Candidate, Election | 1,484,460 |
4 | Martin O’Malley | 4.6 | 4 | 322 | Support, Candidate, Issue, debate, Job, Minimum Wage | 79,275 |
5 | Hillary Clinton | 6.3 | 1 | 290 | President, Voting, Funding, GOP, Voter, Law Enforcement | 1,353,581 |
Data and Ranking of Republican Candidates (past study)
Rank | Candidate | Supporters’ Mistakes per 100 Words | Poll Rank (2) | Unique Words Per 1000 Words* | Most Common | Facebook Followers |
5 | Carly Fiorina | 6.3 | 6 | 250 | Candidate, Support, Debate, Campaign, Message, Job | 454,561 |
7 | Ben Carson | 6.6 | 2 | 215 | President, Nation, Integrity, Celebrate, Elect, Donate | 3,878,162 |
8 | Lindsey Graham | 7.2 | 13 | 236 | Flag, Support, Confederate, Issue, Senator, Amendment | 135,695 |
8 | George Pataki | 7.2 | 14 | 270 | Candidate, Support, Republican, Campaign, Concern, GOP | 19,026 |
10 | Ted Cruz | 7.3 | 5 | 240 | Senator, President, Candidate, Elect, Constitution, Republican | 1,465,666 |
11 | John Kasich | 7.7 | 9 | 267 | Core, Job, Budget, President, Republican, Balance | 145,223 |
12 | Jeb Bush | 7.9 | 3 | 221 | President, Republican, Support, Campaign, Job, Candidate | 281,046 |
13 | Mike Huckabee | 8.0 | 7 | 232 | President, Candidate, Nation, Illegal, Elect, Drug | 1,845,114 |
14 | Bobby Jindal | 8.2 | 12 | 246 | President, Republican, Liberal, Inspire, Advocate, Conservative | 283,352 |
15 | Chris Christie | 8.3 | 10 | 246 | President, Support, Flag, Issue, Comment, Guy | 125,340 |
16 | Rand Paul | 8.4 | 8 | 263 | Republican, Candidate, Liberty, Illegal, Immigrant, Citizen | 2,066,331 |
17 | Marco Rubio | 8.8 | 4 | 280 | Senator, Republican, Campaign, President, Candidate, Citizen | 1,029,359 |
18 | Rick Santorum | 11.5 | 11 | 241 | President, Candidate, Nation, Republican, Founding, Democrat | 265,330 |
19 | Donald Trump | 12.6 | 1 | 226 | President, Illegal, Legal, Immigrant, Border, Immigration | 3,828,553 |
* To calculate the Unique Words per 1,000 Words statistic, we divided Total Unique Words by Total Words and multiplied by 1000.
Democrats vs. Republicans
Democrat | Stat | Republican |
4.2 | Supporters’ Mistakes Per 100 Words | 8.7 |
300 | Unique Words Per 1,000 Words | 245 |
41.8 | Average Number of Words Per Comment | 32.4 |
591,623 | Average Number of Facebook Followers | 1,130,197 |
Source:
- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_democratic_presidential_nomination-3824.html
- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html
- https://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/
Infographic
Click here to view and download it in high resolution. If you’d like to embed it, please use:
Please attribute the study to Grammarly with a link to https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check |
Click here to view and download it in high resolution. If you’d like to embed it, please use:
Please attribute the study to Grammarly with a link to https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check |
Click here to view and download it in high resolution. If you’d like to embed it, please use:
Please attribute the study to Grammarly with a link to https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check |
Methodology
We began by taking a large sample of Facebook comments containing at least fifteen words from each candidate’s official page between April, 2015 and August, 2015. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative. Since the point of the study was to analyze the writing of each candidate’s supporters, we considered only obviously positive or neutral comments. Obviously negative or critical comments, as well as ambiguous or borderline negative comments, were disqualified.
We then randomly selected at least 180 of these positive and neutral comments (~6,000 words) to analyze for each candidate. Using Grammarly, we identified the errors in the comments, which were then verified and tallied by a team of live proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.
Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.
Contact Information
Michael Mager +1 (415) 549-6941 | Karen Hertzberg |