Prediction of the American Presidential Election in Terms of the Speeches

Abstract

In 2008, the American Presidential election will be held. We tried to estimate who would be the President in terms of the English literary style of the candidates' speeches. In short, we analyzed various speeches of the two Presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain metrically. Comparing them with special characteristic tendencies of successive Presidents' speeches, we tried an estimation. For this study, each characteristic of character- and word-appearance was approximated by an exponential function to educe some peculiar features of each speech. The estimation values were derived from all past Presidents' inaugural addresses using 6 kinds of approximate equations. Judging from the results, we predicted that Obama would be the 44th President as far as English style is concerned.