Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In order to make sense of a mountain of words, I created a tool that analyzes the frequency of word and phrase usage in a body of text. The texts in this case were the transcripts of candidates’ speeches and interviews culled from Project Vote Smart between January and early April, creating a corpus of over 80,000 words (roughly the number of words in a 320-page novel). The tool then identifies phrases of one to six words in length that have been used with a non-trivial frequency. So what does it tell us?

On the Primary and the General Election

The popular understanding of the Republican primary was that Romney was more focused on Obama, while Santorum was busy battling Romney. The data bears this out: While both candidates mentioned Obama with high frequency — 2.2 mentions per thousand (MPT) for Romney, 2.0 MPT for Santorum — Santorum discussed other Republican candidates (3.8 MPT for his Republican peers) about three and a half times as often as Romney (1.1 MPT).

On a related and somewhat humorous note, one of Santorum’s favorite eight-word phrases was “Romney is the worst Republican in the country.” Digging into the actual text turned up a second, related phrase commonly used by Santorum: “make Barack Obama the issue in this [election].” Santorum generally used that phrase to compare “Romneycare” (a word with a relatively high 0.4 MPT for Santorum) with “Obamacare.” By contrast, one of Romney’s favorite six-word phrases was: “I’m going to become the nominee.”

On Job Creation and the Economy

One of the main memes of this election cycle has been “jobs” and “job creation.” (Admittedly, it’s at least a minor meme in every presidential election.) But who talked about jobs more often? Romney did — more than twice as often, in fact. Romney had a “job creation”-related MPT of 1.7, compared to 0.8 for Santorum.

A related, significant component of the broader discussion on the economy was the subprime mortgage crisis. When it comes to terms that are a part of this discussion such as “Fannie,” “Freddie” and “homes,” Romney was once again the dominant voice, with an MPT of 1.0, well above Santorum’s MPT of 0.2

While Romney addressed specific aspects of the economy more often, both candidates discussed the “economy” with a relatively close (and fairly high) frequency. Santorum’s MPT for economic terms was 1.9, only about 13 percent lower than Romney’s MPT of 2.2.

Faith and Conservatism

Santorum used faith-related terms about three times as frequently as Romney did, based on the occurrence of words like “God,” “faith,” “church,” “Christian” and “religion.” Romney had about 0.5 MPT, as compared to Santorum’s 1.4 MPT.

Both candidates had good reason to discuss their conservative credentials: Voters and the media constantly questioned Romney’s conservatism, and Santorum’s steadfast conservatism was a competitive differentiator. And yet, it was Santorum who mentioned “conservative” and “conservatism” about 40 percent more frequently than Romney, with an MPT of 1.4 against Romney’s 1.0. In the end, one of Santorum’s clearest advantages — one that he spoke about with regularity — did not pay dividends.

Speech Patterns: Vocabulary and Verbal Tics

As it turns out, both candidates had nearly an identical-size vocabulary across the body of text analyzed. Santorum used 4,088 unique words, while Romney used 4,090. By another measure, however, Romney spoke with more diversity: Santorum repeated 247 two-word phrases more than 15 times each, representing over 20.3 percent of his speech. Romney had just 233 such phrases, representing only 18.5 percent of his speech.

But when it comes to common verbal tics like “uh,” “um” and “you know,” Santorum was the undisputed leader. While transcripts generally don’t include “um” and “uh,” they capture in spades “you know,” “well” and the repetition of common words, such as “the … the.” Romney demonstrated a “verbal tic” MPT of only 6.0, compared to Santorum’s 9.8. In fact, roughly one out of every 200 two-word phrases uttered by Santorum was “you know.”

Bringing It All Together

The above analysis allows us to roll up all of these topics into a fascinating side-by-side comparison. It’s important to note that these figures are very meaningful when comparing candidates. When it comes to topic-to-topic comparisons, the results may be deceiving. It’s easy to count mentions of President Obama’s name, for example; it’s much harder to calculate mentions of specific topics — like jobs or the economy — that have many different synonyms. Nevertheless, these figures provide a directional, data-driven picture of how much time each candidate spent discussing any particular issue.

While the ultimate reason for Santorum’s loss might have more to do with money and momentum, these results point to two possible conclusions. The first (and more likely) is that these differences are exactly what enabled Santorum to stay competitive as long as he did, and that an apples-to-apples choice on economic issues would have sealed Romney’s candidacy earlier. But might Santorum have done better by dedicating more time to jobs and housing? Did he spend too much time attacking Romney instead of focusing on his own positions? Did Santorum’s propensity for verbal tics shake voters’ confidence?

As Romney now rejiggers his message for the general election, he’s likely to emphasize even more the subjects that have been his main talking points throughout the primary: the economy and President Obama. Whether his faith becomes more or less of an issue as Election Day nears remains to be seen. And his discussion of “other candidates” will disappear completely — unless, that is, you’re counting on another comeback from Newt Gingrich.

Left unsaid is that a certain candidate would never “curse out” a New York Times reporter, because a certain candidate simply doesn’t curse. Mitt Romney can’t bring himself to say “hell” in public. When, during the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, Romney was accused of publicly berating a volunteer security officer, he denied only that he swore while doing so: “I would not, have not, and never would use the f-word,” he told the press. He admitted only to saying “H-E double hockey sticks.” The irony is that Romney actually has a horrible relationship with the press, he just doesn’t make a big show of it.

Romney fundamentally distrusts journalists. He freezes them out. When he was in the private sector, he could happily ignore them. In politics, he prefers to manage them with as much distance as possible. His campaign was notorious for essentially ignoring journalists entirely, until they belatedly realized that, you know, journalists could be induced to write nice things about the candidate if they are treated humanely. Hence: baked Lays for the press corps and an Ann Romney charm offensive.

When your candidate’s media strategy is total avoidance, you don’t really get conservative movement “cred” for hating the liberal media. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich lives for the attention of the press, and his ostentatious displays of media hatred are basically what Santorum was trying to emulate this weekend.

In 2007, Romney lost his cool with AP reporter Glen Johnson. Here’s Romney, unfiltered and pissed off!

“Excuse me, excuse me, Glen!” You accuse Mitt Romney of lying, you get a stern but polite response.

You attack Mitt Romney’s religion, and then accuse him of “running away” from his church, as Iowa conservative talk show host Jan Mickelson did in 2007, and you get … firm, polite debate!

This gets raw 10 minutes in, when they go off the air. “You’re wrong!” is about as salty as it gets.

Unhappily for Romney, he gets the same treatment from Fox News that it typically saves for liberals — there’s no “safe” media outlet to shill for him, as Fox does for most other Republican candidates. Romney’s entire media base is perhaps a few newspaper columnists.

Romney-hating conservatives are ignoring the candidate who hates the mainstream media most of all. If he could find some way to get that message across, keeping in mind the challenge of avoiding profanity, he might have an easier time in this endless primary.

“Unless something unusual happens, unless Romney steps on a land mine, he looks like he’s going to be the nominee,” Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and RNC chairman, said on Sunday. That pronouncement came a few days after Jeb Bush came out for Romney and Jim DeMint essentially did the same, and it was followed today by endorsements of Romney from Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Tea Party icon. According to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, the endorsement floodgates may really open if Romney prevails in next week’s Wisconsin primary.

In a way, the growing consensus that the GOP race is over and that Santorum has been reduced to an irritant’s role makes sense. Basic voting patterns that are apparently immune to momentum have seemingly taken over, guaranteeing Romney a floor of support that is very, very likely to push him past the magic 1,144-delegate number by the end of the primary season. And, obviously, it’s in the interest of Republican Party leaders to unite their party around a nominee as soon as possible.

But Santorum is an odd sort of doomed candidate because — as he demonstrated over the weekend — he’s still capable of winning primaries, often by big margins. A significant chunk of the Republican base is still eager to vote for someone, anyone other than Romney, and it’s entirely possible that Santorum will end up winning more than 20 states. There’s also still a theoretical possibility that Romney will fall short of 1,144 during the primary season, which would create a theoretical opportunity for Santorum to use the pre-convention months this summer to win the nomination. This makes him different than previous candidates who were accused of hanging around too long. Pat Buchanan in 1996, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson in 1988 were being drubbed in primary after primary when the political world decided to ignore their campaigns and treat the process as finished. They weren’t still racking up victories.

If there’s a parallel for what Santorum is now facing, it can be found in George H.W. Bush’s 1980 campaign. At roughly this same point in the process, Bush had around 200 delegates, far behind Ronald Reagan, who had nearly 600 – with 998 needed to win the nomination. Except for John Anderson, who left the race to run as an independent, all of the Republican candidates who’d dropped out – Bob Dole, Howard Baker, Phil Crane and John Connally – had thrown support to Reagan, and key party leaders were jumping on board too. There were loud calls for Bush to quit, and warnings that his lingering presence would damage Reagan’s chances of knocking off Jimmy Carter in the fall. The Reagan campaign itself adopted a strategy of ignoring its last remaining rival.

But Bush, who came to the race with scant name recognition and support only to break through with a surprise Iowa victory, remained viable in key state primaries. On April 22, he beat Reagan in Pennsylvania by 8 points. Ten days later, he nearly won in Texas, which had been one of Reagan’s strongest states in 1976. And on May  20, he scored an absolute landslide in Michigan, annihilating Reagan by 25 points.

Bush, who campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment and a critic of Reagan’s supply-side economic agenda, was running from the left, but he was playing the same basic role that Santorum now is – the vehicle for the unusually large number of Republicans who really, really didn’t want to support the front-runner.

Today, the holdouts that Santorum is appealing to are mainly religious conservatives in the South and in rural areas across the country. Those voters were part of Reagan’s base in ’80. But the GOP back then still had a Rockefeller wing and was still a major force in the Northeast and industrial states, and among these Republicans Reagan was seen as an extreme ideologue who would have trouble winning in the fall.

Like Santorum, it took Bush a long time to get the one-on-one race he’d always wanted; if Baker and Anderson had dropped out sooner, he probably would have won more states. But even as his inevitability built, Reagan continued to encounter stiff resistance from moderate and liberal Republicans. As late as May, a national poll of Republican voters put Reagan only 8 points ahead of Bush.

Two factors ultimately pushed Bush out of the race. One was practical: On the night of his big Michigan victory, several news organizations announced that Reagan had nonetheless cleared the 998-delegate mark. This was a matter of dispute; then as now, there was no uniform delegate tally and serious disagreement over how to account for them. Plus, Bush’s campaign was insisting that hundreds of delegates who’d been pledged to Reagan during the primaries were actually free agents. The Bush strategy was to demonstrate strength in the late primaries, then to pressure these delegates into backing him. But the loud declarations from major news outlets that the race was over rained on Bush’s Michigan parade and dried up his fundraising overnight. Within days, he was out of the race.

Of course, Bush had another incentive not to press on any further. The depths of intraparty Reagan resistance that his campaign had revealed increased the pressure on Reagan to choose a moderate as his running mate. And Bush, by virtue of his surprisingly strong primary season showing, would be a logical choice for the role. In the days before dropping out, Bush had called himself “unequivocally opposed” to serving as Reagan’s No. 2. But after bowing out, he stopped issuing denials, and when Reagan’s effort to entice the preeminent GOP moderate, former President Gerald Ford, onto his ticket failed, Bush became the choice.

Santorum’s candidacy has highlighted similar intraparty resistance to Romney, so the same basic logic that landed Bush on the ticket 32 years ago could apply to him. It’s true that the Republicans who’ve been lining up behind Santorum seem mainly motivated not by affection for him but by opposition to Romney, but this was also the case for Bush in his race against Reagan. It’s also true that Santorum is stridently attacking Romney right now, but, again, Bush did the same thing to Reagan well into the spring of 1980 (when, for instance, he accused Reagan of trying to turn the clock back to the 18th century).

Santorum’s odds of winning the nomination are not entirely nonexistent right now, but they are slim. His chances of procuring the vice presidency are probably much better. As the calls for his exit grow louder in the weeks ahead, he may do well to consider what listening to them did for the last GOP candidate in his situation.

The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.

And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)

Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.

There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.

A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.

So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)

Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.

Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)

Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?

After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.

And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)

But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!

As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.

Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?

Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.

(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)

One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).

The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)