Each candidate on stage in Thursday night’s Republican debate had precious little time to pack in as many talking points, zingers and one-liners as possible. TIME ran an analysis of which words each presidential hopeful used the most compared to the average Republican candidate.
Methodology
To gather a baseline of language that Republican candidates favor, TIME looked at the frequency of each word in last night’s debate and 11 debates from the 2012 presidential cycle. Then we looked at each candidate’s responses from Thursday’s debate and identified words that he used much more frequently than other GOP candidates past and present. A small amount of editorial discretion was used to pick the word that best captured a candidate’s performance using this sort of analysis.
All photographs from Associated Press.
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Write to Chris Wilson at chris.wilson@time.com