Barbers for Romney

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:58:00 +0000

Recently, Mitt Romney used a conversation he had with a firefighter as part of his campaign pitch. "I spoke with a fireman yesterday, and he has a one-bedroom apartment, and his wife is pregnant, and he can't afford a second bedroom," he told an audience in Virginia. "I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 of them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had."

Just because Romney is a fan of firemen doesn’t mean that firemen are fans of Romney, however: pick a random donor from the Obama and Romney campaigns, and the Obama donor is 10 times as likely to be a firefighter. How do we know this? From campaign finance disclosure data. As it turns out, campaigns must make “best efforts” to obtain the occupation and employer of anyone who contributes more than $200.

With over 500,000 contributions to the 2012 Romney and Obama campaigns, these contributions represent a lot of money ($177 million, to be exact) and a ton of fascinating data. By counting how often certain job titles appear in these disclosures, we can create a data-driven summary of the degree to which different professions support each candidate. For example, contributions to President Obama’s campaign are 80 percent more likely to be from dancers than those to Gov. Romney’s. And even though Obama enjoys nearly a 30 percent lead with physicians, surgeons favor Romney by almost 200 percent.

Romney vs. Santorum: What their words reveal

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Now that the Romney campaign is officially shaking its Etch-A-Sketch, the name “Rick Santorum” will begin to fade from our collective memory. As he exits the national stage, I find myself wondering what kept him from capitalizing on the “anything-but-Romney” attitude that seemed to define many Republican voters’ attitudes. Money, certainly, was a significant and well-documented driver of the outcome. But what if we sought to understand the primary through a data-driven lens?

An interesting question, for sure, but, as anyone who works with data knows, the first challenge is to get your hands on the numbers. Fortunately, there’s one source of data that politicians are eager to provide in limitless quantities: their words.

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?

Salon.com > Dan Kozikowski

Barbers for Romney

Romney vs. Santorum: What their words reveal