Now that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are behind us, the New York Timeshas released a series of visualizations that compare the tone and content of the nominees' respective speeches. At a glimpse, they reveal Clinton's sunny optimism—and the paranoid darkness that permeates Trump's rhetoric.
The Times' first, and arguably most powerful, visualization highlights passages of each nominee's speech that talk about America. Positive sentiments about the U.S. are highlighted green ("We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had"—Hillary Clinton), and negative things are highlighted red ("The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen."—Donald Trump.)
To be fair, Trump is trying to push the Democrats out of the White House, and he's not going to do that by talking about what a great job they're doing. But as the Times visualization makes clear, the content of his speech was so negative, entire pages of his speech are marked entirely in red. Comparatively, he only had three positive things to say about America his speech, two of which appear to have been entirely rhetorical: "How great are our police? And how great is Cleveland?" Pretty much the entire content of the speech was just pure negativity.
Not that that surprises anyone. More surprising is what the Times' visualizations show the two candidates' speeches (and those of their running mates) had in common. Roughly speaking, both Mike Pence and Tim Kaine spent about the same amount of time in their speeches praising their running mates. Clinton and Trump also devoted about the same amount of time in their speeches to attacking each other—as did Pence and Kaine.
This isn't the first comparison of the way Clinton's DNC speech differs from Trump's, but it does a better job at showing the stark difference in tone that marked the two conventions. Check it out here.