Week 3 – Preliminary Findings

In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of my preliminary findings from the first debates I’ve been watching. I’m going to focus on the first Trump/Clinton debate from 2016, as well as the sole Florida gubernatorial debate between Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist.

Comparing these two debates was most striking because of differences in specificity in the two candidates’ speaking styles. Trump has a reputation for using vague, broad, overly simplistic statements, and he certainly proved that standard from my analysis of this first debate. By contrast, I rarely flagged DeSantis for lack of specificity while watching his debate. While I cannot derive any explicit conclusions until I’ve analyzed all the debates I plan to watch, I will not be surprised if DeSantis ends up using vague language the least out of the candidates I examine. DeSantis and Crist’s ability to go into detail about certain hot-button Floridian issues, including the Floridian economy, education, homeowners insurance, gas prices, and immigration made their debate more productive than the Trump/Clinton debate I witnessed, and possibly the other debates I will watch because candidates could easily call out the other’s falsehoods and address what their opponent said. Notably, the candidates called each other out for missteps, including statements such as, “that’s not true and you know it.” Conversely, the lack of specificity in the presidential debate I witnessed made responding to opponents’ points more difficult. Clinton had to argue her opponents’ points were using “bad judgment.” Conversely, Clinton’s use of specifics enabled her opponent to respond with specific refutations, such as repeating “wrong” or “that’s lies.”

In the coming weeks, I’m going to be watching other debates and beginning to assemble data. I will be able to have a more in-depth discussion of my findings and come up with more extensive conclusions once I have a complete data set. Thanks for reading!