What Debate Transcripts Reveal About Trump and Clinton’s Final War of Words

During their most combative debate moments, Donald Trump turns negative and Hillary Clinton turns inward. Past debates and convention speeches suggest that neither is a formula for success on the big stage. When pressed in debates, Trump increases his use of negative emotion words—“disaster, “terrible”—to launch counterattacks, while Clinton logs a noticeable uptick in “me” words—pronouns like “I,” “my,” “mine,” and “myself”—to mount point-by-point defenses, according to a Bloomberg Politics and Quantified Communications analysis of their two general-election face-offs and combined 20 primary debates.

In every one of his 13 presidential debates to date, Trump has, overall, been more positive than negative. While he portrays politicians as “stupid” and the Iran nuclear deal as “disastrous,” he has spent more time talking about how he will make America “great” again and his plans for the country will be a “tremendous” “success.” But there's a trend: In last Sunday’s debate with Clinton, 25 of every 1,000 words Trump uttered were negative-emotion words, outpacing the first general-election debate (22 per 1,000) and all but one primary debate. His positive language, meanwhile, fell from 33 words per 1,000 to 27 between the primary debates and the most recent general-election debate. Against the self-proclaimed backdrop of a “rigged” election, “phony” sexual-assault accusers, and even the “boring and unfunny” satire of Saturday Night Live, Trump’s negative language looks set to rise even further on Wednesday.