liberal
For liberal states, we chose to analyze California and New York, both traditionally liberal states that are also home to high percentages of minority residents.
CALIFORNIA
NEW YORK
BOTH VOTED FOR
Hillary Clinton
CURRENT EVENTS
In California, pertinent issues included:
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Repealing or altering the death penalty
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Tobacco taxes
In New York, pertinent issues included:
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Drug and crime addiction
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Racial conflict
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SALT (State and Local Tax) Deductions
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Funding for 9/11 victims
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Opioid epidemic
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Infrastructure
TEXT ANALYSIS
By archiving the top 1000 local articles in the time leading up to the election period, we were able to perform text analysis through Voyant tools to identify the most frequent words mentioned for local articles in each state. By comparing articles from both states, we also used TF-IDF to identify words unique to each state within this category. (* = repeated words)
California
MOST FREQUENT WORDS:
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Trump*
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Republican*
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Clinton*
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Candidate*
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Vote*
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Primary
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Democratic*
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Campaign*
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Elected
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Obama*
New York
MOST FREQUENT WORDS:
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Republican*
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Clinton*
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Obama*
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Voters*
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Campaign*
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Donald
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Race
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Democratic*
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General
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Candidate*
MOST UNIQUE WORDS:
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CALIFORNIA: taxpayers, minimum, F.B.I, finalists, Radulovich, continuity, distinct, carries, unplatable, tragic, shudder, jurors, DNC, bloodbaths
​
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NEW YORK: G.O.P, affluent, resentment, surveys, trails, utterly, underestimate, discontent, blogs, rough, indicators, disadvantage, repulsive, probable, bureaucracy
Combined comparison
SO WHAT?
Individual State Text Analyses
Based on the text analyses above, we can see that the commonly discussed topics between the two liberal states are highly similar. Both states focused on the presidential candidates (Trump & Clinton) as well as Obama, who was president at the time. In addition to the frequently occurring candidate names, the word clouds seem to contain largely general political vocabulary such as 'vote', 'court', 'support', 'people', 'elect' etc. Overall, it appears that local news in both California and New York tend to focus more on the opinions on individual candidates rather than general issues in the state, and there does not seem to be a particular issue of concern.
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Moreover, though the lists of pertinent issues for both states reflected different interests, likely due to the difference in demographics, all issues were specifically addressed by Hillary Clinton's campaign platform. Though both populations already had a strong leaning towards liberal ideas, the alignment between Clinton's platform and pertinent social issues likely contributed greatly to her wins in both states during the presidential election.
Combined Text Analysis
While the individual state analysis was not particularly reflective of state commonalities and differences, the combined analysis reflected an interesting choice of language among articles in both states. In fact, after taking out the place names from the TF-IDF analysis (e.g. 'Inland' in CA), most of the words with high significance (i.e. most unique) seemed to be very negatively charged, likely indicating strong sentiments towards perceived injustices within each state.
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By examining the list of significant words more closely, we can see that Californians seem to be primarily concerned about about taxes ("taxpayers), criminal justice ("jurors", "F.B.I.") and even democracy ("DNC", "Radulovich" - refering to Milo Radulovich, the Air Force lieutenant accused of Communist sympathies during the Red Scare). The presence of words like "unpalatable", "tragic", "shudder" and "bloodbaths" are more extreme and do not seem to be in response to any particular event, but are telling of the emotional language often employed in news reporting to gain readers' sympathy and support. These terms are also reflective of the pertinent issues in California in 2016, such as death penalty and tobacco taxes,
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On the other hand, New Yorkers seem to exhibit particularly strong feelings against the Republican party ("G.O.P."), and bureaucracy, using critical words such as "affluent", "resentment", "utterly", "underestimate", "rough", "disadvantage", and "repulsive". News in New York seemed to be more statistically driven as well, given the occurrences of words such as "trends", "surveys", and "probable". A focus on such topics seem to be in line with both the state's and Trump's associations with Wall Street, often associated to lack of transparency in the business sector. These terms are also related to some pertinent issues in 2016 New York, such as SALT deductions and poverty.