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New Analysis Ranks Presidential Candidates By Their Supporters’ Grammar

Donald Trump’s supporters think your an idiot. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
Donald Trump’s supporters think your an idiot. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Bernie Sanders supporters might think you’re great, but Donald Trump supporters think your an idiot.

Grammar-wise, that’s at least what might be derived from a new analysis released Tuesday by the proofreading app Grammarly. By analyzing the spelling and grammar of comments on each presidential candidate’s Facebook page, the analysis found that Republican supporters made mistakes at nearly twice the rate of Democratic supporters.

To get their results, Grammarly went to each candidate’s Facebook page, taking comments that were at least 15 words long and expressed either positive or neutral feelings about the candidate. Then, researchers randomly selected at least 180 of those comments to analyze for each candidate.

The analysis — intended by Grammarly to be “a lighthearted look at how well the 2016 presidential candidates’ supporters write when they’re debating online” — found that, for every 100 words written, an average Democratic candidate supporter made 4.2 mistakes, while an average Republican candidate backer made 8.7 errors. It also asserted that Democratic supporters have larger vocabularies, using 300 unique words for every 1,000 words they use, compared to Republicans who only use only 245 unique words for every 1,000.

CREDIT: Graphic by Dylan Petrohilos/Data from Grammarly
CREDIT: Graphic by Dylan Petrohilos/Data from Grammarly

Of course, there was more room for error on the Republican side, which has nearly three times as many candidates. In addition, many Republican candidates have a lot more Facebook supporters, meaning the pool from which Grammarly’s researchers picked its 180 comments was much larger. For example, Lincoln Chafee only has 9,526 Facebook followers, while Donald Trump has 3.8 million. Overall, the average number of Facebook followers for Republicans was 1.1 million, while the average for Democrats was about 591,000.

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Taken individually, however, Democratic supporters did better than their Republican counterparts when it came to spelling and grammar.

According to the Grammarly, former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee — likely receiving the best campaign news he’s had in a long time — has the most grammatically savvy supporters. Donald Trump’s backers make the most mistakes.

Here are the top ten candidates (plus Donald Trump) ranked in terms of their Facebook supporters’ grammar skills, according to Grammarly:

CREDIT: Graphic by Dylan Petrohilos/Data from Grammarly
CREDIT: Graphic by Dylan Petrohilos/Data from Grammarly

Those who didn’t make the top ten included former Florida Governor Jeb Bush — whose supporters came in 12th with 7.9 mistakes per 100 words — and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), whose backers came in 17th with 8.8 mistakes per 100 words. The rest of the rankings can be found here, where Trump supporters, of course, rank as the most likely to break grammatical rules.

But then, Trump has never been one for following rules anyway.