Digging into the Nexis newspaper archives, I collected tens of thousands of articles about Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump—whatever was published in more than 50 U.S. newspapers and websites over a 13-month period from July 2015 through August 2016. (I also pulled a year’s worth of campaign coverage about Bill Clinton from his 1992 run for president; more on that in a minute.) Reagan then took the data and fed it into his computer model, which spit out a complex portrait of the tone of campaign coverage over the past year. We had the beginnings of a sentiment analysis of presidential campaign coverage, one that might suggest the emotional tone of media stories about each candidate.

Trump may feel validated to know that, indeed, we found that articles about him, overall, were the most negative of the bunch—even before the utter insanity of the past several weeks. But there are plenty of caveats.

First, let’s look at the data. A totally neutral article—one with just as many happy words as sad words—would have scored a 5.0 on Reagan’s ranking system. Sanders, Clinton, and Trump all scored higher than that—meaning, the collection of articles about each of them were more positive than negative. That’s not surprising, Reagan told me, because natural language is biased toward happy words.

The 18,640 articles about Hillary Clinton that we assessed scored 5.85 on the happiness scale, whereas the 29,019 stories about Trump from that same period ranked 5.78—not quite as happy. Bernie Sanders scored the highest for the positive tone of coverage about him, with a ranking of 5.90 across 7,841 articles. (For context on what these numbers mean, consider the happiest day on Twitter in the past year: Christmas day, according to Reagan’s model, with a score of 6.28.) It isn’t clear from the number-rankings alone, but the differences we found in coverage are meaningful—if not exactly dramatic. The scores themselves are “only useful in relative terms,” Reagan told me. And they’re most interesting once you dig into the substance of why coverage about one candidate is more positive or negative than the next.

On a word-by-word basis, we can see why coverage of Trump skews more negative—and in many cases it seems to be because the coverage about him reflects the language he himself uses.

So, for instance, the word “great” appears frequently in articles Trump, whose campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” And because “great” is perceived as an exceedingly positive word—it ranks 55th happiest on a list of more than 10,000 words—this helps buoy his score. But there are many other negative words frequently associated with Trump—more so than with Hillary Clinton—that drag it back down, including: “bad,” “racist,” “war,” “no,” “don’t,” “ban,” and “illegal.”

This doesn't come as much of a surprise: Some of Trump’s loudest campaign messages have been about his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States—or, in his words a “complete and total shutdown”—and his belief that illegal immigrants “have to go.” Tonally, many observers noted a deep contrast in rhetoric between Trump and Clinton at the conventions in July—Trump’s speech was widely perceived as far more pessimistic than Clinton's. Put another way, a sentiment analysis of the candidates’ words—just verbatim transcripts, with no added reporting—might still find a more negative ranking for Trump.