An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts
KAMALA HARRIS and Donald Trump met for the first time at the presidential debate on September 10th. Ms Harris extended a hand and introduced herself to him—and also to many Americans. Mr Trump has been so present in people’s living rooms that there is little left to learn or parody. Ms Harris, on the other hand, is still making early impressions on many voters. How did their performances compare?
Pundits are poring over recordings but it can be hard to quantify their judgments objectively. Naturally, partisans on both sides think their candidate won (although far more Democrats had a favourable view of Ms Harris’s performance than Republicans did of Mr Trump’s). But some aspects can be quantified. Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been analysing political language for two decades on Language Log, a blog where he quantifies what other people have only a hunch about. Sometimes these findings are counterintuitive: at the Democratic National Convention last month Bill Clinton, mocking Mr Trump’s self-obsession, said to “count the I’s” when listening to him speak. Mr Liberman did just that, and found that Mr Clinton (and Ms Harris) both used “I” in their convention speeches at a greater rate than Mr Trump did. For the Trump-Harris debate, Mr Liberman offers three insights (see charts below).
First, as with previous debates, Mr Trump managed to out-talk his opponent: he spoke for a total of 42 minutes to Ms Harris’s 37, and at 198 words per minute to her 160. He also took more turns, jumping in so often that he spoke fully 54 times to her 29. But as Mr Liberman found in previous performances in separate debates, Ms Harris’s vocabulary was considerably more varied. It took her about 4,000 spoken words to use 1,000 distinct words; it took the former president 6,000 words to reach the same mark, probably because he so frequently repeats himself.
Second, Mr Liberman did a “weighted log-odds ratio” analysis of the two speakers (ie, which words each one of them used in greatest contrast to the other). They make a surprising list. Mr Trump’s most distinctive word was “they”. He frequently sought to link Ms Harris to Joe Biden, the president whom she replaced on the Democratic ticket. In fact, Mr Trump used “they” almost twice as much as he did “she”. He also focused ire on other “theys”, especially immigrants: “they’re coming in and taking jobs… they’re taking over the towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently.” He also repeated a much-derided, unsubstantiated story about Haitians in Ohio: “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” The other most Trumpian words included “good”, “bad” and “millions”.
Ms Harris was distinctly more likely to use “America” and “American”—the latter 27 times, against once for Mr Trump. She also mentioned “the United States” about three times as often as he did. The former president prefers “country”, usually “our country” (“they’re selling our country down the tubes”). Ms Harris’s most distinctive word, on Mr Liberman’s calculation, was “work”, and not far down the list, “families”—perhaps an intentional effort to project Democrats as a party for the swing-voting centre, rather than for the coastal elites (and childless cat ladies).
The final charts show the average pitches of the two candidates and their variability within each speaking turn (which can be a rough proxy for emotional arousal). Both candidates start at a lower average pitch and with lower variability, before showing a fair amount of range throughout the debate. Mr Trump was at his most animated (a highly variable pitch) when asked if he had any regrets about his behaviour during the Capitol attack on January 6th 2021.
A particularly striking difference can be seen at the right end of the chart. Ms Harris’s final statement returned close to the tone she began with—low and stable—much like a prosecutor closing a case that she thinks she made well. Mr Trump, in clear contrast, and unusually for a closing statement, gave one of his more animated turns of the night, rising in pitch and variability as he denounced “what these people have done to our country”; “they’re destroying our country, the worst president, the worst vice-president in the history of our country” was his final line. In other words, Mr Trump sounded like a man still trying to put energy into changing the narrative—or possibly just like a man who knows he has not had his best night.■