2016 Presidential Debate Analysis

I don’t know about you, but during the 2016 presidential campaign, I didn’t really want to watch the presidential debates; primary, general, vice-presidential – all of them were painful in some way or another to watch.

And yet, as a political scientist who’s spent no small amount of time doing research on presidential campaigns, I felt compelled to attend to this civic event. During the primaries, I dealt with my ambivalence by following twitter debate hashtags. But once we hit the general election season, I decided to channel my anxiety more productively – I started scraping the debate texts and playing with them in R.

I ended up presenting some of this analysis a couple of times in the fall of 2016 – at a Digital Humanities conference at UVA and at our local Charlottesillve R meetup. While this work preceded the launch of the Data for Demoracy Lab @ UVA, it shaped my thinking and inspired the Public Presidency Project. So I include it here as an pre-project.