The O-Bomb

It's no secret that the GOP dislikes President Barack Obama. They've made every effort possible to stymie his administration's initiatives, from voting over 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act to calling him every word short of "nigger". As the 2016 Presidential election hits high gear with the Iowa caucuses on Monday, and candidates inevitably begin dropping out of the race, I wanted to see whether their hatred for Obama meant anything. 

So, I tracked their negative mentions of the President. Using an application called OutWit Hub, I scraped multiple versions of each GOP debate's transcript to see how many times they said Obama's name or implied him in their rhetoric. The findings were as you'd expect, though there were some surprises.

From the August 6th to the January 14th debate, the top 9 GOP candidates (Trump, Cruz, Bush, Rubio, Christie, Carson, Fiorina, Kasich, and Paul) have negatively mentioned the President 245 times. That's an average of 40 per debate and 27 per candidate, though there are some huge outliers. Check out my analysis of these mentions and what they mean on my Medium page.