How Clinton’s and Trump’s convention speeches compared to those of their predecessors

By THE DATA TEAM

FEW party-convention speeches have differed more in tone than those given by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump over the past two weeks. They also stand out in comparison with their predecessors. The Economist calculated sentiment scores for every party-convention speech delivered by a presidential candidate since 1980, by counting the number of positive and negative words per sentence (as defined by this lexicon). We then applied a moving average to filter out some of the noise. By this metric, Mr Trump delivered the most negative speech in recent memory, warning that America was “at a moment of crisis”. (His speech only became sunnier near the end, as he shifted his focus to his family.) In contrast, Mrs Clinton gave one of the most level-headed speeches of the past four decades, choosing to stay mildly and uniformly positive.