How Stump Speeches by Harris and Trump Differ (and Don’t)

Vice President Kamala Harris sticks closely to her script and vetted talking points. Former President Donald J. Trump ad-libs freely and digresses often. Ms. Harris’s speeches seldom exceed half an hour. Mr. Trump’s remarks are usually at least twice as long. She crafts her sentences carefully. He veers often from the facts.

The two presidential candidates differ greatly in rhetoric and adherence to the truth. Ms. Harris’s repeated stump speech contains few factual errors, while Mr. Trump’s rallies are a font of exaggerations to outright lies.

On the debate stage on Tuesday night, these tendencies were on full display — Ms. Harris spoke cautiously and broadly, and Mr. Trump made impromptu remarks that veered into the outlandish. Here’s a deeper look at their contrasting styles in campaign speeches as the candidates hit the trail.

A New York Times analysis of a month’s worth of rally speeches from each candidate showcases Mr. Trump’s freewheeling oratory and Ms. Harris’s disciplined messaging. Using an artificial intelligence model to assess semantic similarity, The Times found that Ms. Harris’s speeches on average contained remarks that were 84 percent similar, compared with 75 percent of Mr. Trump’s.

Of course, slogans — like Ms. Harris’s refrain of “we are not going back” and Mr. Trump’s “we will make America great again” — account for some of the repetition. But in many cases, even when speaking more specifically about policy or when criticizing their opponent, Ms. Harris repeated the same remarks almost verbatim while Mr. Trump improvised on the same themes. The Times found that Ms. Harris’s speeches contained more than 80 instances of repeated exact phrases, compared with fewer than a dozen for Mr. Trump.