State of the Union: The words, the facts, the data
What do presidents historically talk about when they address the nation, and how does it compare to trends in areas such as jobs, wages, education, national security, and healthcare?
Here’s the data behind President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.
We analyzed the words in his latest address to Congress, alongside every such speech since 1980. From immigration to war, here’s an analysis of each president’s words.
Methodology
The State of the Union is a Constitutionally-required address from the president to both branches of Congress. It serves to update the country on the current conditions of our democracy. Technically, a president’s first address to Congress is not a State of the Union, but it serves the same purpose and merits inclusion.
To create the analysis, we used transcripts from the American Presidency Project and used R to compile the text and count word frequency. Common words (“and”, “the”, etc.) and words that occur frequently in the entire corpus (“states”) are largely filtered out. The 2018 word count is based upon the speech transcript distributed prior to delivery.
Keep exploring
- How USAFacts created the Data Skills for Congress program - USAFacts and UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy launched Data Skills for Congress, the first program of its kind approved by the House and Senate Ethics Committees.
- How to use government data - The US government generates data on everything from unemployment rates to the status of endangered marine mammals. Here’s why that’s important.
- USAFacts backs House's evidence-based policy commission - Data is missing from policymaking. The Subcommittee on Modernization of the Committee on House Administration aims to fix that.
- USAFacts presents its first-ever policy recommendations to Congress to enhance public data infrastructure - Limited or deficient data makes it difficult to address key issues of national concern — but leveraging modern technology and data can help affect change.