We reverse-engineered the perfect campaign sentence using a Democratic debate word cloud

Words matter. But in the hustle of politics, not all words are created equal.

That’s why Fusion’s semanticists worked through the small hours of the morning to parse everything the Democratic candidates said during Tuesday night’s debate, carefully sifting through the meaningless rhetoric to find a dozen or so nuggets of pure linguistic gold. In short, the words that count the most.

From that word cloud, we reverse-engineered the perfect sentence. Say it enough times with a wave and a friendly smile and you’re guaranteed to win enough votes to secure the White House in 2016.

Without further ado, the empirically derived, magical sentence that contains all 12 keywords from the debate:

“People of the world, as the president of this country I will work with Wall Street to pass legislation that ends the war in Iraq and brings security and health to America.”

It might not make perfect sense, but it’s the perfect sentence.

The truly adventurous candidate—or the one with the most ground to make up in the polls—might try a more daring combination for dramatic effect:

“People of Iraq, as the president of the world, I will bring war to America, security to Wall Street, and work to repeal legislation that provides health in this country.”

It might not get you elected, but it’ll certainly get you noticed.

Really, any combination will do. What the sentence lacks in logic, it makes up for in science. Just consider the numbers: “People” was mentioned 109 times last night, followed by “work,” which was said 66 times. “America” was uttered 65 times, and “country” 61. Rounding out the list are “president” (34), “world” (28), “Wall Street” (20), “legislation” (19), “health” (18), and “security” and “Iraq,” tied at 13. “Sandinistas” was mentioned only once (by Anderson Cooper), and probably won’t be heard again for the rest of the campaign. So don’t use that word.

Now it’s time to craft your own magic sentence. First step is to connect with the people.

Now that you’ve got the people’s attention, talk about work, working and workers. People like that.

Then remind people that we’re all in this together: America, a fine country if there ever was one.