Eight Daugaard State of the State Addresses in Word Clouds and Numbers

The Governor’s office finally posted the transcript of Dennis Daugaard’s final State of the State address yesterday. We thus can compare all eight of Daugaard’s annual opening addresses to the South Dakota Legislature.

To start, see what these eight speeches look like as word clouds. I’ve plugged the text of each speech into WordClouds.com, which tosses out words of less than three letter, prepositions, the, and perhaps some other small, common words and then arranges the rest with the words in proportion to how frequently they appear in the text. The images below appear in chronological order, left to right, top to bottom (hover to see the year; click/tap to embiggen; click Back to return to this article and gallery):

We may quibble over the accuracy of the word cloud algorithm: it counts  South  and  Dakota as separate words, even though we understand that South Dakota is one word in our minds and hearts. That strict interpretation of spaces and word separators also means that South‘s count gets inflated by its separation from Dakotan. (Compound noun South Dakotan appears seven times in the 2018 speech, the same number of times as Trump. Blech! And Obama does not appear in any of Daugaard’s eight State of the State Addresses.)

We can look at the numbers and see that Governor Daugaard made his final State of the State Address his longest:

Year	total word count	“meaningful” word count	% “meaningful”	unique “meaningful” words
2011	5,758	3,111	54.03%	1,331
2012	8,738	4,633	53.02%	1,671
2013	7,004	3,844	54.88%	1,687
2014	9,700	5,458	56.27%	2,164
2015	9,644	5,409	56.09%	2,122
2016	9,404	5,329	56.67%	2,135
2017	8,923	5,139	57.59%	2,202
2018	10,390	5,876	56.55%	2,458

Daugaard’s 2011 Session opener ran just 5,758 total words—cut out the articles, prepositions, and other small words, and we get 3,111 “meaningful” words. Striking repetition, Daugaard used 1,331 unique “meaningful” words in that 2011 speech—those are the words mapped in the first word cloud. Daugaard’s relative shortness of words perhaps psychologically reflects the shortness of budget that year, when he asked the Legislature for across-the-board 10% cuts to deal with the structural deficit Mike Rounds left for him to fix.

Daugaard bounced back the following year with over 8,700 words and broke 9,000 in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Governing apparently gives a guy more to say. Tuesday he broke 10,000 and used 2,458 unique “meaningful” words.

I invite suggestions for further linguistic analysis of the Governor’s State of the State Addresses! Let me know what you’d like to know, and I’ll see if we can mathematically know it!