For a conversation between two men, Tim Walz and JD Vance spent a lot of time talking about “women” at the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1. But the way they did, showed that their views are worlds apart.

The Storybench team combed through the text transcript of the debate and found that, while Walz and Vance occasionally used similar words, they did so in very different contexts, often using the same terms to refer to different ideas. Nowhere was that more apparent than in discussions of abortion, health and childcare.

Buckle up – this analysis began with some snazzy computational methods catapulted us into what text analysis experts call “qualitative coding.”* We call it a lot (a lot) of manually combing through the text, line by line. (Remember how you dissected those short stories in English class? We’ll spare you the gory details.) While computational text analysis can count words, figuring out context is something that can’t be done wholly computationally (yet). 

Let’s start with the candidates’ discussion of women. 

Looking at a WordTree, where the size of each phrase corresponds to its frequency in the text, allows us to better visualize the context of how each candidate uses a given word. Vance most frequently used “women” in his discussion of what “a lot of young women would” want. Vance’s words, nestled in the context of discussions on abortion, emphasize his view that “young women would love to have families” and that “a lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately” after childbirth. 

In contrast, Walz’ wording around “women” was more varied, though some patterns are still identifiable. Representative phrases that we found more frequently used in conjunction with “women” include “for women to make their choices,” “women in charge of their healthcare” and “we’re pro-women.” In discussions on abortion, which often overlapped with the use of the word “women,” Walz often used the words “health” and “care” as well, reflecting a different framing of abortion care. 

Who is “she”? 

To further investigate the VP candidates’ discussion of women, we scoured the text transcript for every mention of “she” and “her.” Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of references to “she” and “her” went to presidential candidate Kamala Harris. 

When we look at all the references to “she” and “her” that don’t refer to Harris, however, we found an interesting pattern. Of Vance’s 44 references to “she” or “her,” 12 instances refer to women with whom he is personally connected: his grandmother, his mother, his wife, or his childhood friend, who he references six times, never by name. 

Walz referred to “she” or “her” just 10 times, excluding his 11 mentions of Harris. All involve stories of individuals who struggled to access abortion care. Specifically, Walz retold the stories of Amber Thurman, Hadley Duvall and Amanda Zurawski. In response to Walz’ mention of Thurman’s death due to lack of access to abortion care, Vance said “I certainly wish that she was [still alive]” – his only reference to “she” that did not refer to Harris or a person with whom he is personally connected.

Whose choice is it? 

Both VP candidates spoke about “freedom” and “choice,” ideas that reflect core values in American political discourse.

But what did they mean by “freedom” and “choice,” and what are their visions for achieving that freedom? 

Walz’s vision of freedom emphasizes individual choice, describing it as “the freedom for you to make choices about yourself.” His discussion of “choice” primarily focused on women having the freedom to make personal decisions about their medical care, including access to abortion. In contrast, Vance’s discussion of “choice” centered on institutions. He emphasizes the rights of state governments to outlaw abortion and the ability of Catholic hospitals to exercise their “freedom of conscience” by refusing to perform abortions.

Same words, worlds apart 

Many viewers noted that the VP candidates seemed surprisingly cordial despite their policy differences, and reporting from NPR and our own Heather Wang documents the frequent occurrence of the word “agree.” But what, if anything, are the candidates agreeing on? 

Our analysis found that while the two agreed on expressing empathy for individuals affected by issues such as lack of abortion access and climate change, they remain far apart on how they propose addressing those issues. 

In our analysis of the candidates’ use of the term “agree,” we found that their frequent use of the term did not correspond with fundamental differences in policy stances and values. Of the two dozen times “agree” was uttered during the debate, only roughly half of those instances were actually instances where the candidates expressed that they “don’t agree,” agree to disagree, or express general consensus or lack of consensus through statements like “you don’t have to agree with everything President Trump has ever said or done.”
The candidates’ pseudo-agreements often also include confusing leaps in logic. For example, while Vance said that he “agree[s] with” Walz on not wanting to “blame immigrants for higher housing prices,” he later clarified that he does, in fact, “blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country.” Vance then speculates that those “25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes” will “drive up home prices.” Attributing the rise in home prices to “illegal aliens” not materially different from “blam[ing] immigrants for higher housing prices.” 

Take a look at our interactive chart below for more on the context in which Vance and Walz “agreed.” 

Last words

With no more debates scheduled, these words present one last look at the candidates when they’re standing face to face. One thing’s for sure – we’ll be continuing to provide behind-the-scenes coverage at Storybench on how journalists are using data to cover the election. 

Did you glean other insights as you analyzed the text with us? Or do you have ideas for other analyses we could perform? Reach out to us on Instagram, X, or LinkedIn, and follow Storybench on social media to keep up with more in-depth, data-driven analysis of the election.

Methodology

The code we used for text analysis can be found here. Our primary text sources were CBS News’ transcript of the Oct. 1, 2024 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. Text analysis was generated through Voyant, WordTrees were generated through Jason Davies’ browser-based tool, and all hand-annotated (qualitatively coded) word references are archived here.

Editor’s note:

An earlier version of this article referred to the method of manually assigning chunks of texts into categories for further analysis as “quantitative coding.” The correct term is “qualitative coding,” not to be confused with coding-based text analysis methods of other varieties that are, in fact, quantitative. For a more extended example of qualitative coding (and for more proof that this is a real, methodologically-sound approach), see Lawrence Evalyn’s “index of tears” analysis of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771). And here’s a link to Shalin Hai-Jew’s primer on using NVivo for manual coding, in case you’re interested in doing some more qualitative coding (or manual coding) of your own (for fun, we imagine).