If You Think Candidates Repeat Themselves, You’re Right

If you think you’ve heard it all before, heard it all before, you have. It turns out, Marco Rubio is not the only repetitive candidate, although no one repeats such long quotes over and over. Or constantly uses the qualifier of “when” he’s president.

FiveThirtyEight.com reports the top twenty phrases by each candidate. You can see them all here, but we’ll give you the top ten:

TRUMP
1. We don’t win
2. You have to
3. It’s going to be
4. Eminent Domain
5. That I can’t tell you
6. You wouldn’t have
7. Give me a break
8. Going to bring jobs back
9. Look at what’s
10. All over the place

CRUZ
1. I would note
2. Business flat tax
3. Right to keep and bear arms
4. Simple flat tax
5. The fight
6. Religious liberty
7. We need a president
8. The “Gang of Eight”
9. Working men and women
10. We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that

RUBIO
1. When I’m president
2. To reach more people and change more lives than ever
3. The 21st century
4. Like the rest of the world
5. The world is safer and a better place when America is the strongest
6. We are going to be
7. In the history of
8. See what the American people are willing to support
9. Under control
10. The greatest country in the world

KASICH
1. Fact of the matter is
2. They have not committed a crime since they’ve been here
3. In Ohio
4. of Ohio
5. A balanced budget
6. The first 100 days
7. When I was in Washington
8. From an 8 billionhole to a 2 billion surplus
9. If you’re in the business of selling things if you’re not going to sell
10. To make sure that

The question is – is Rubio really the most robotic-redundant? There’s a term, “tf-idf”– short for term frequency–inverse document frequency—described in Wikipedia.

Again, according to FiveThirtyEight,

Each candidate’s share of all phrases spoken by the remaining GOP hopefuls in the 2015 election debates that have a tf-idf score, a measure of repetitiveness, over 20

Rubio—52.6%
Trump—18.9%
Cruz—15.8%
Kasich—12.6%

Assuming that we will have more match-ups (ask Trump), FiveThirtyEight suggests that to make the debates less boring, you might use the above phrases in a drinking game. Bottoms up.