Your RNC / DNC Convention Reduced to a Word Cloud
Posted by: frets in politics, word clouds, tags: convention, election, mccain, obama, speechesNow that the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are over, I grabbed all of the (available) speech texts from the DNC and RNC Web sites and threw them into wordle.net just for fun (yep, I’m sadistic that way sometimes). It is hard to compare word occurrences because the Republicans don’t have nearly as many speeches available (52) as the Democrats (168). The Reps lost a day to Gustav, but they also seem to only have the major speeches available online, whereas the Dems have everything available.
Some interesting findings in the data (hover for definitions):
The Obama-to-McCain ratio (DNC): 2.9:1
The McCain-to-Obama ratio (RNC): 8:1
The Obama-to-Bush ratio (DNC): 4.9:1
The McCain-to-Bush ratio (RNC): 88:1 Bush was only mentioned 4 times in speeches available at the RNC.
The Obama-to-Biden ratio (DNC): 9.9:1
The McCain-to-Palin ratio (RNC): 8:1
Here are the word clouds:
Here’s the top 15 words:
| DNC Top 15 | RNC Top 15 | |
| 1 | barack | john |
| 2 | obama | mccain |
| 3 | america | country |
| 4 | change | america |
| 5 | need | people |
| 6 | years | american |
| 7 | american | know |
| 8 | people | can |
| 9 | can | need |
| 10 | country | world |
| 11 | president | president |
| 12 | mccain | americans |
| 13 | john | government |
| 14 | new | want |
| 15 | work | like |
Here are links to the word clouds at wordle.net:
And if you haven’t had enough, I’ve linked both the DNC speech word counts and RNC speech word counts as text (csv) files. Enjoy!


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