The social media platform Twitter has become ingrained in our political culture. According to a 2015 study, the typical member of Congress now tweets nearly twice as often as they did before the app shot into the mainstream. Which has allowed us to see who the worst-spelling senators are.
Senators are particularly active on Twitter, as tweeting is an easy way for them to communicate their views on current affairs, educate us on current government policies, and keep their constituents up to date on real-time issues. Each senator’s Twitter account has followers in the hundreds of thousands – and some of the more popular ones have over 1 million followers.
That being said, the typical lawmaker has been a charismatic public speaker for years, otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are most likely. Unfortunately, not all of them have the most exquisite communication skills on the app. We analyzed the last 1000 tweets of each member of the US Senate to discover which of them had the worst grammar and spelling mistakes.
Top 20 Worst Spelling and Grammatically Incorrect Senators
In an average month, the senator’s accounts produce more than 100,000 tweets and Facebook posts, which receive tens of millions of audience favorites, reactions, shares and retweets.
- Chuck Grassley
The state of Iowa’s Republican senator Chuck Grassley is the worst spelling senator on Twitter by miles. Averaging at 1800 misspelled words in his last 1000 tweets, Grassly has almost two typos or grammatically incorrect words in every single tweet!
The former farmer was educated in University of Northern Iowa, achieving an M.A. in political science. He is now in his seventh term in the Senate office, having held the seat since 1980.
Regardless of Grassley’s extensive professional background, his twitter grammar downfall comes with the typical ‘old school’ use of slang and shortened words in his tweets. The senator is a fan of abbreviations like “2nite” and “ppl”. He also commonly leaves out crucial punctuation like full stops, inserts capital letters in the wrong places as well as tweeting out a bunch of typos.
That being said, Chuck Grassley is in fact the oldest Senator of all 100 to represent the US, at age 88. You have to give him props for using his Twitter account so consistently and not hiring a marketing team to do it for him!
- Joe Manchin
The next worst spelling senator is Joe Manchin of the Democratic party. Democratic lawmakers post more content on Twitter, while the median Republican member now averages more audience engagement. More tweets means… more room for mistakes!
Manchin has held his seat for West Virginia since 2010. Although not quite as high as Grassley, we found 910 misspelled words in Manchin’s last 1000 tweets – meaning he has incorrect grammar in almost every single tweet.
- Mike Crapo
There’s definitely a pattern in older folk having not-so-great grammar on twitter. Another Republican comes in third place for grammatically incorrect language on Twitter. Mike Crapo, the senator for Idaho is currently 70 years old. He was previously a lawyer and studied at Harvard University, but he is still a fan of keyboard shortcuts for language in his tweets.
- Patrick Leahy
81-year-old Patrick Leahy also has some trouble with grammar, having 770 misspelled words in his last 1000 tweets.
At age 34, Leahy was the youngest U.S. senator in Vermont history and also the only Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Vermont.
Again, with his age, we don’t expect him to be a wizz on social media – and we can’t complain about the random grammar. He also was voted one of the most popular senators in a 2020 study, so it doesn’t stop anyone from taking him seriously.
- Maggie Hassan
Hassan is serving as the junior United States senator from New Hampshire. A Democrat, Hassan was elected to the Senate in 2016. The 63-year-old is the second woman in American history to be elected both Governor and United States Senator, along with fellow New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen.
We found 710 misspellings in her last 1000 tweets.
Democrats vs Republicans
Which party is more grammatically correct? On average Democrats have 520 misspellings in their last 1000 tweets, whereas Republicans have 635.
Patrick Leahy has almost double the amount of misspellings of Tim Kaine, 63-year old senator for Virginia who sits at number 20 on our table. Kaine nears one million followers on the app, so there’s no surprise he’s double checking his tweets for any errors before publishing them.
Sitting in the middle of our top 20 worst spellers is Richard Blumenthal. The senator of Connecticut has 700k+ followers and is super active on Twitter. We found out 520 of his last tweets has grammatical mistakes and typos!
Chucky Grassley has a whopping amount of typos, misspellings and grammatically incorrect phrases compared to others in the Republican senate.
Just escaping 3rd place is Susan Collins. In 2020, Collins was voted as the least popular senator, according to an analysis done by Statista. Despite this, the Maine Senator has over half a million followers on twitter and it states in her bio that all the tweets quote on quote “originate from the Press Office of Senator Susan Collins”. Looks like she may need a new spell-checker employee however, as we found 670 typos and grammatical mistakes in her last 1000 tweets.
One of the most popular senators, Rand Paul, sits around the middle of our table. The controversial senator for Kentucky who claims he “fights for the constitution” in his Twitter bio has a whopping 3.4 million followers on the social media site. We found out that over half of his latest 1000 tweets have spelling and grammar mistakes in them!
At Ditto Transcripts we are into words, grammar, and all things English language because of the nature of our work. Working within the vast legal system transcribing everything from depositions to bail hearings we understand the need to be accurate.
This is our second blog where we dug into the data to see what we would find. After some long hours pouring over the data we thought we’d have some fun analyzing which US Senators, leaders of our country, have the worst spelling and grammar!
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