Lincoln Chaffe supporters are the best, at 3.1 mistakes per 100 words. To find out which candidate has the most grammatically correct supporters, the app Grammarly conducted a study on Democratic and Republican candidates’ Facebook pages – and it turns out that Republican commenters get the red squiggly underline more than twice as often as Democrats do.
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The company summarized all of its findings in an interesting infographic you can view here. The company concluded that supporters of Republican candidates made more errors than supporters of Democrats, used less diverse words, and Donald Trump supporters were the worst grammar offenders of them all. Of the 19 supporter bases evaluated, Donald Trump’s did the worst, recording 12.6 mistakes per 100 words. And whereas Chafee follower’s favorite words were pretty bland: candidate, debate, support, campaign, senator and Democratic – Trump’s people tossed about hot button words such as illegal and immigrant. So whose supporters came out on top and who ranked at the bottom?
The other takeaway? Democrats tend to use better grammar than Republicans.
Not that surprising consider that Donald Trump is a walking, talking internet comments section.
Comments featuring slang words, commas in a series, overly negative rhetoric or less than 15 words were not analyzed. Republican supporters, however, were more concise, averaging 32.4 words per comment, compared to 41.8 words among Democrats. Finally, 180 randomly selected posts from the narrowed down sample from each candidate’s page was tested.
The comments were first analyzed using Grammerly’s online proofreader, and then verified and tallied by a team of proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement.
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The final numbers were calculated by dividing the comments’ total word counts by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.
