Back in 2004 Pete Buttigieg, his Harvard Colleague, Ganesh Sitaraman, along with Peter Emerson wrote an intriguing, fun article suggesting that by counting the number of words in the party platform, you could figure out who would win the presidential election. The smaller the page count, the more potential for winning the election.
They surfaced a great deal of examples to support their proposal. They found that since 1960 the average page count of the Democrats' platforms in losing years was 82 pages, but that the average of winning years was 46. The longest platforms at 128 and 124 pages came during the disastrous years of 1980 and 1984.
They also found that another indicator was what they called the candidate-to-opponent ratio. In the Democrats long 1984 platform they were unable to spell out their platform without mentioning/comparing to the Republicans. That year Ronald Reagan was mentioned 213 times, while Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate wasn't mentioned once. Reagan won by a complete rout.
These guys also studied the rhetorical use of words, specifically the use of "crisis." The Republicans used the term "crisis" a dozen times in their 1980 platform, including in the first sentence. Of course, that was the year that Reagan won in a landslide.
I've thought about this article and my own background of rhetoric in the past months by comparing Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren. I've listened to Buttigieg throughout his campaign and compared his positioning to that of Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg was in no hurry whatsoever to create policy. In fact, he pushed back on media's demands for a lotta policy statements, wanting to keep his approach simple, while Warren made "I've a policy for that" her mantra. All along my rhetoric background suggested that what Pete's doing is very smart and that Elizabeth Warren's inundating us with policy will bring her down, even though right now she's getting all the attention...
I'm also aware that speeches should limit their major points to less than five, and the fewer the better. Pete's campaign speech works out to just three points (he's "trinitarian"--ha!), while Warren's is much more complex. But what's more intriguing is that Pete's intimate friend, Ganesh, has been Warren's advisor for years. And furthermore, Pete's orientation to policy is just about identical to Sitaraman and Alstott's new book, The Public Option. Still, all this suggests that Buttigieg will beat Warren.
Right now it's seven months before the Iowa caucuses, so who's to tell? But by following these recommendations and paying attention to the Democratic and Republican platforms--you might even learn who America's next president will be.
**NYT, 7/10/2004, Buttigieg, Emerson and Sitaraman, Winning Between the Lines.