Update: this article was featured in The US News & World Report.

While watching some of 2016's presidential debates, I remember having the distinct feeling that some candidates appeared to view the United States as a country replete with problems to solve rather than opportunities to grow. Indeed, it seemed to be a far cry from President Obama's rallying call of hope, the ideological platform that propelled him to the White House in 2008. While diction may be no more than how one frames the same situation, a candidate's level of a positivity can play an important role in how they are viewed by the public.

Using the full debate transcripts from UC Santa Barbara's "The American Presidency Project", I evaluated just how positive the candidates were during debates. For each debate, I combined each candidate's speech, then passed it through a natural language processor located here (see footnote 1) to calculate the sentiment.