Hogan Covers Budget, Taxes More Than O'Malley Did in State of the State Address

Times are changing. During Gov. Larry Hogan's first State of the State speech this week, he spent way more time talking about the state budget and taxes than his predecessor Gov. Martin O'Malley did in the State of the State speeches at the beginning of each of his two terms in office. O'Malley spent more time in 2007 and 2011 talking about the environment, security and health than Hogan did in 2015, a Capital News Service analysis found. For people coming from our Facebook page, Hogan said "tax" 19 times and "taxes" nine times.

By Stephanie Gutierrez-Munguia and Kate McNee

CAPITAL NEWS SERVICE

Capital News Service used Voyant, an online text analyzer to count the frequency of each word in the 2007, 2011 and 2015 speeches. CNS pulled out words that were repeated three times or more - about 200 per speech -- and grouped them into larger topical categories. In some cases, a word could be assigned to multiple categories depending on context. For example, CNS classified the words "bay," "Chesapeake" and "rain" as environmental words. The total number of words in each topical category was divided by the overall number of words in the speech to obtain the percentages shown on the graphic. One limitation: because CNS did not examine words that appeared only once or twice, the graphic could underrepresent discussion of topics where a range of different words were used.