U.S. Elections: Length of Political Party Platforms vs Number of Electoral Votes

Every political party has its own platform that comprises a set of its principal goals. The purpose of a political party platform is to appeal to the general public in order to gather its support on elections. So, what platforms help to get more votes?

This is a difficult question to answer, as there are a lot of qualitative factors affecting a platform's appeal. Still, there is one quantitative factor that could be apparently measured. And this is a platform's length in words. Indeed, this is not the key determinant of a platform's relative strength, but it at least could show how easily the platform could be read and understood by the general public and thus supported by it.

As the history of the U.S. presidential elections shows, in 23 out of 43 cases, the nominee from the party with the lengthier platform won the elections. Moreover, there is a slight positive relation between a political party platform's length and the number of electoral votes received by the political party's nominee.

There are two possible explanations to this: either shorter platform does not mean easier to understand or lengthier platforms are considered to be more "clever". And finally, it could be that a platform's length just does not affect its appeal at all and the correlation is a matter of chance.

Anyway, in this year's elections, Republican Party's platform is longer than that of the Democratic Party on 9,409 words. So, if a platform's length really increases (even lightly) a nominee's chances to win the elections, then this is a positive sign to Donald Trump. Yet the results of the latest national polls show that Hillary Clinton is supported by a bigger share of the U.S. citizens - a factor that seems to be more significant than the length of a political party platform.

See also: U.S. Presidential Elections Data Hub | 2016 Presidential Elections: Latest Polls | Campaign Financing | Election Preferences & Presidential Job Approval | Voting History: Popular and Electoral Votes | Gender Differences | Presidential Vetoes | National Conventions