During Thursday’s primetime GOP debate, not all of the candidates received equal airtime. This much was obvious to viewers, and also makes sense; there is substantially more audience interest in poll-leader Donald Trump than in ninth-place Chris Christie. But the differences among the candidates were both more substantial and less correlated with polling averages than one might think.
The New York Times calculated the speaking time of each candidate; unsurprisingly, Trump dominated at over eleven minutes, and Jeb Bush was easily in second at nearly nine minutes. But while Scott Walker may be third in the polls, he spoke for less than six minutes, less than any other candidate besides Rand Paul. Meanwhile John Kasich, who entered the debate at tenth in the polls, received the third-most speaking time.
But a candidate’s speaking time does not tell us the amount of information they communicated. For that, we need to analyze the content in a more direct way: by total words spoken. Taking the CBS News transcript of the debate and counting the number of words each candidate said gives a very different ranking:
Trump still leads the pack and Paul still brings up the rear, but the similarities end there. Even though Walker and Christie had less speaking time than any candidate but Paul, they managed to communicate more content than most other people on the stage. Meanwhile, Ben Carson turned a decent amount of speaking time into a fairly low amount of content, being the only candidate besides Paul to fail to break 1,000 words.
These discrepancies can be explained by vastly different speaking speeds among the candidates:
Carson stands out as an outlier, speaking far more slowly than the narration speed for a typical audiobook. Trump, Paul, Bush, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee all had a very deliberate, recognizable speed, within the suggested range for a radio broadcast. In contrast, Walker, Christie, and Marco Rubio all spoke at a notably fast pace, pushing the limits of what is easily comprehensible. Kasich seemed to look for a middle ground, speaking more quickly than most people are typically accustomed to, but still well under 200 words per minute.
None of these speeds are necessarily superior; while Walker and Rubio may have communicated more content by speaking quickly, one could argue that they did so at a rhetorical cost. Furthermore, not all content is created equal. Speaking more quickly may be worthwhile if it conveys an extra policy point or anecdote, but simply counting the number of words doesn’t distinguish between valuable information and unnecessarily verbose language.
That said, there seems to be a relationship between talking speed and electoral polish. Carson and Trump, the only candidates in this debate to have never run for elected office, were the two slowest talkers. Further, the two candidates who have only been elected to office once, Cruz and Paul, were the next slowest. Meanwhile, the only three candidates to have faced an election in the past two years—Walker, Christie, and Kasich—were all among the four fastest talkers. As such, it is possible that as the debates go on, more and more candidates will raise their speaking speeds.
Regardless of whether the discrepancies in talking speeds are signs of rustiness or of fundamental stylistic differences, one thing is clear: when it comes to presidential debates, it’s not just a question of what the candidates say, but how quickly they say it.