Chafee Supporters are Most “Grammatically Correct” in Presidential Race

“Whoever your pick for POTUS, one thing’s certain – political topics inspire passionate discussions”, the company wrote in a post on their website.

A new analysis of supporter writing from the proofreading app Grammarly has found that Democrats have larger vocabularies and make fewer mistakes when writing online than Republicans.

Coming up in the rankings right behind Trump were fellow Republicans Rick Santorum with 11.5 grammar errors per 100 words and Marco Rubio with 8.8 mistakes per 100 words.

The trend is starker when broken out by candidate: The five Democratic candidates – Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton – all get better Facebook grammar scores (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina, whose supporters posted the best grammar scores of any GOP candidate, tying her with Clinton.

Lincoln Chafee supporters may be small in number, but they came out on top of the grammar charts, making an average of just 3.1 errors per 100 words.

ThinkProgress noted Republican Facebook pages are more likely to contain errors because the party has more candidates, many of whom have more supporters on Facebook than their Democratic rivals. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative. They then selected 180 comments from each page at random and analyzed them for spelling and grammar mistakes.

It ran all of the comments through its automated proofreader and had a team of humans on hand to verify and tally the errors. For the objective of the study, Grammarly only counted misspellings, wrong or missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement, letting slang words, serial commas, and miswritten numerals slide.