Dumb as a Trump: These Republicans really are a bunch of illiterates

A new survey by the grammar app Grammarly reveals just how poor the GOP's grasp of the English language truly is

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Published October 8, 2015 8:00AM (EDT)

 Donald Trump (AP/Julie Jacobson)
Donald Trump (AP/Julie Jacobson)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet Democrats convinced they are smarter and better educated than their Republican friends and family may be right after all—at least in terms of being able to speak the English language properly.

A new "study" done by the grammar app Grammarly examined the Facebook comments of the supporters of all major Presidential candidates and noticed some startling patterns. According to USA Today:

Supporters commenting on Democratic candidates’ Facebook pages made an average of 4.2 mistakes per 100 words compared to 8.7 mistakes for supporters of Republican candidates. The Democratic supporters also showed a larger vocabulary, using on average 300 unique words per 1,000 words, while Republicans used only 245.

The trend is starker when broken out by candidate: The five Democratic candidates — Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton — all get better Facebook grammar scores (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina, whose supporters posted the best grammar scores of any GOP candidate, tying her with Clinton.

Ouch. 245 words vs. 300. That seems like a sizable gap. Of course, good grammar does not directly correlate with success - either in life or in politics. Just ask Lincoln Chafee who scored the most grammatical but also had the least supporters of the survey.

Grammarly's study did not, unfortunately, include any third party candidates.

The findings are consistent with studies that do show Republicans are generally are less likely to go to college than Democrats. But, liberals should not get too smug. Studies also show that Tea Partiers, somewhat paradoxically, are more likely to have a college degree than non-Tea Partiers so that certainly complicates matters.


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