The most common words in Hillary Clinton’s speeches, in one chart

Seemingly everyone on the internet has their own critique of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

One common criticism is that she spent too much time talking about special-interest issues, targeting the various discrete constituencies of the Democratic left, and too little talking about broad economic issues relevant to all working people. She got caught up in “identity politics,” the critique goes.

Put aside, for a moment, the notion that economic issues can be separated from identity politics (they cannot). Let’s focus on the critique of Clinton. It’s one I’ve heard so many times that I got curious: What did Clinton talk about?

To find out, I gathered all her campaign speeches (from both the primary and general campaigns) into one document and did a simple word-frequency analysis.

The results are below. As you can see, I’ve been as generous as possible in filing things under “identity politics.” Anything about minorities or criminal justice or gay people or immigrants, I filed as identity politics. I even included mentions of climate and clean energy in that category, though in a sane world those would be top-tier economic issues.

So, without further ado, what did Hillary Clinton talk about?

Yeah. She talked about jobs, workers, and the economy — more than anything else. They were the central focus of her public speeches.

You can critique how she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Maybe she should have used different words, or framed things differently. Maybe, despite running on an agenda of worker-friendly policies, she should have chosen a clearer, simpler economic theme and hit it more often.

You can critique where she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Clearly, in retrospect, she should have spent more time and resources in those upper Midwestern swing states.

But you cannot say she didn’t talk about jobs, workers, and the economy. She talked about them all the time, more than anything else.

It’s just not what voters heard. Here’s what they heard in the two-month period of July 17 to September 18, according to Gallup polling:

Virtually everything the media said about Clinton was about corruption, one way or another. None of it was about policy. None of it was about her actual priorities, as reflected in her speeches and her agenda.

You can critique the Clinton campaign in all sorts of ways, but excess rhetorical attention to identity politics simply isn’t one of them.