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!
I loved how he talked about Education as a topic in his speech, for 20 seconds highlighting an 8% pay raise and then moved on to Transportation. jfc
He is a Trump shill. He spoke more about Trump’s wants and Daugaard’s twisting fellow governors’ arms.
Good point, Leslie. The Governor opened with 2,578 words on Workforce, which did include discussion of secondary and post-secondary education, but always with an increasing orientation toward providing the job training businesses used to provide on their own dime (creeping socialism, anyone?). The section headed “Education” was 128 words. Other section word counts:
Transportation: 303
Stewardship of State Assets (selling state buildings, maintaining state pension and parks): 903
Legion Lake Fire: 363
Nonmeandered Waters: 218
Open Government : 440
Online Sales Tax: 216
Economic Development (a.k.a corporate Welfare): 842
Regulation of Alcohol: 165
Building South Dakota Fund: 291
Tribal Relations: 236
Infant Mortality: 343
Medicaid Work Requirement: 312
Opioids: 406
Meth: 221
Criminal Justice: 890
National Guard: 314
Agriculture: 370
Closing: 641
So yes, as a subheaded topic in the speech transcript, education received the least attention.
Daugaard mentioned Donald Trump under three topics: Workforce, Medicaid work req, and opioids. He mentioned Trump and his Administration six times and included mention of Ivanka once as part of a June meeting at the White House with several governors.