favstats / demdebates2020

Transcripts of Democratic Debates as R Package

demdebates2020

The goal of demdebates2020 is to provide access to all transcripts of the Democratic debates of the 2020 Presidential Election.

Usage

The package includes a single dataset: debates. This dataset represents the spoken words of all Democratic candidates for US president at eleven Democratic debates. The following sources have been used to compile the data: Washington Post, Des Moines Register and rev.com. The dataset has the following eight columns:

• speaker: Who is speaking
• background: Reactions from the audience, includes (APPLAUSE) or (LAUGHTER)
  • only availabe for the first seven and ninth debates
• speech: Transcribed speech
• type: Candidate, Moderator or Protester
• gender: The gender of the person speaking
• debate: Which debate
• day: Which day of the debate
  • first and second debate were held on two separate days
• order: The order in which the speech acts were delivered

There are two ways in which you can access the dataset.

1. Read .csv file directly from GitHub

debates_url <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/favstats/demdebates2020/master/data/debates.csv"

debates <- readr::read_csv(debates_url)

2. Install and load the R package like this:

devtools::install_github("favstats/demdebates2020")

library(demdebates2020)

Example

demdebates2020::debates %>% 
  dplyr::slice(1508:1510) %>% 
  knitr::kable()

speaker	background	speech	type	gender	debate	day	order
Bernie Sanders	NA	One of the differences - one of the differences that Joe and I have in our record is Joe voted for that war, I helped lead the opposition to that war, which was a total disaster.	Candidate	male	1	2	759
Bernie Sanders	(APPLAUSE)	NA	Candidate	male	1	2	760
Bernie Sanders	NA	Second of all, I helped lead the effort for the first time to utilize the War Powers Act to get the United States out of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which is the most horrific humanitarian disaster on Earth.	Candidate	male	1	2	761

Blog Post

Check out this blog post for some more data exploration.

Sources

• Debate 1, Day 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/27/transcript-night-one-first-democratic-debate-annotated/
• Debate 1, Day 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/28/transcript-night-first-democratic-debate/
• Debate 2, Day 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/31/transcript-first-night-second-democratic-debate/
• Debate 2, Day 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/01/transcript-night-second-democratic-debate/
• Debate 3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/13/transcript-third-democratic-debate/
• Debate 4: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/15/october-democratic-debate-transcript/
• Debate 5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/21/transcript-november-democratic-debate/
• Debate 6: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/20/transcript-december-democratic-debate/
• Debate 7: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2020/01/14/democratic-debate-transcript-what-the-candidates-said-quotes/4460789002/
• Debate 8: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/new-hampshire-democratic-debate-transcript
• Debate 9: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/full-transcript-ninth-democratic-debate-las-vegas-n1139546
• Debate 10: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-carolina-democratic-debate-full-transcript-text/
• Debate 11: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/march-democratic-debate-transcript-joe-biden-bernie-sanders