Red and blue language: Word choices in the Trump & Harris 2024 presidential debate

Abstract

Political debates are a peculiar type of political discourse, in which candidates directly confront one another, addressing not only the the moderator's questions, but also their opponent's statements, as well as the concerns of voters from both parties and undecided voters. Therefore, language is adjusted to meet specific expectations and achieve persuasion. We analyse how the language of Trump and Harris during the debate (September 10th 2024) differs in relation to the following semantic and pragmatic features, for which we formulated targeted hypotheses: framing values and ideology, appealing to emotion, using words with different degrees of concreteness and specificity, addressing others through singular or plural pronouns. Our findings include: differences in the use of figurative frames (Harris often framing issues around recovery and empowerment, Trump often focused on crisis and decline); similar use of emotional language, with Trump showing a slight higher tendency toward negativity and toward less subjective language compared to Harris; no significant difference in the specificity of candidates' responses; similar use of abstract language, with Trump showing more variability than Harris, depending on the subject discussed; differences in addressing the opponent, with Trump not mentioning Harris by name, while Harris referring to Trump frequently; different uses of pronouns, with Harris using both singular and plural pronouns equally, while Trump using more singular pronouns. The results are discussed in relation to previous literature on Red and Blue language, which refers to distinct linguistic patterns associated with conservative (Red) and liberal (Blue) political ideologies.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: The word cloud shows red words for Trump and blue words for Harris, with word size representing frequency, highlighting the most common terms in their responses.
• Figure 2: Bar plots showing the frequency of words in both candidates’ responses. Left/Red plot shows Trump's most frequent words with “go” being by far the most frequent word. Right/Blue shows Harris’ most frequent words with “people”, “president” and “Trump” as the top three most frequent words.
• Figure 3: Top ten frequencies of named entities in Trump (red) and Harris’ (blue) responses. With "Donald Trump" being Harris' most mentioned entity and Biden being Trump’s most named entity.
• Figure 4: For each response we average the amount of positive (1) and negative (-1) sentences to retrieve the distribution of sentiments across the debate for Trump (red) and Harris (blue). A large bold bar at -1 therefore indicates that one or all of the sentences in the response were classified as negative by the model.
• Figure 5: The upper bars (red shades) indicate the average (across sentences) subjectivity score of Trump's responses. The lower bars (blue shades) show those for Harris' responses. A bold bar with high subjectivity indicates that the response contained many subjective sentences. These subjectivity scores are evaluated by the spaCyTextBlob model.