education results

Supporters of Donald Trump and other Republicans get worst grammar grades

Donald Trump may be leading his rival Republican presidential aspirants in the polls, but, when it comes to his supporters’ facility with grammar, he’s running dead last.
And, according to the Presidential Debate Grammar Power Rankings survey — conducted by the Grammarly blog — Republican supporters, overall, trail Democratic candidates’ backers in grammar skills.
The survey methodology involved scanning the Facebook pages of the 2016 presidential candidates in search of grammatical and related writing errors, such as subject-verb disagreement. Grammarly first looked at the grammar of Republican supporters in August, followed by a parallel Democratic study that was published on Tuesday. Simultaneously, Grammarly has stacked the two parties’ adherents up against each other.

Grammarly sought to zero in on representative positive and neutral comments and then determined the number of misspellings, incorrect and absent punctuation, misused or missing words, and noun-verb issues contained in them. Those errors were verified and tallied by a team of proofreaders. Then, finally, according to Grammarly, “we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.”
The Democrats’ supporters came out on top, with 4.2 mistakes per 100 words, versus 8.7 mistakes per 100 words among the Republican candidates’ backers.
As for Trump, his supporters ranked last among supporters of all candidates from both parties when it came to grammar, with an average of 12.6 errors per 100 words. Rick Santorum’s followers logged 11.5 errors per 100 words to claim the penultimate rank.
The top five spots, as far as fewest linguistic miscues logged, were dominated by Democrats, led by 3.1 errors per 100 words for supporters of Republican-cum-Democrat Lincoln Chafee. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s supporters were tied for fifth, with 6.3 errors per 100 words, with those of GOP candidate Carly Fiorina.
Relatedly, or perhaps merely coincidentally, a Pew Research study released Oct. 1 showed that the biggest chunk of Trump’s supporters, 30%, possesses a high-school education or less. In contrast, 48% of Clinton’s declared supporters have a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Trump came out fighting in an interview with CNN late Tuesday, saying even if rivals Fiorina and Ben Carson are gaining in the GOP polls, he’s in it for the long haul. “I’m not getting out. I’m going to win, OK?” Trump added. “The answer is: I’m going all the way, and I’m going to win.”