Ninety-two candidates. Roughly 220,000 words of self-promotion. One question: what are they actually saying? Below: rhetorical positioning, sentiment, AI-suspicion, clichés, ego indexes and constituency overlap — all derived from the public bios on vote.je.
Two views of the same chart. Bio rhetoric shows where each candidate's bio language sits. Researched record overrides bios with positions derived from public record (Hansard, party platforms, ministerial briefs, local press) for the 34 prominent candidates we researched manually. Both, with arrows shows the gap.
Bio rhetoric tells you how candidates present themselves. Researched record tells you where they actually sit. The arrow view is gold for an article: every arrow is a candidate whose self-presentation diverges from their public record.
Top ten candidates whose bio language sits furthest from their researched political position. Only candidates in the prominent set (party-affiliated + sitting Senatorial candidates) have researched scores; for everyone else this gap is undefined.
Average per-sentence sentiment (VADER). Positive = sunny, future-facing, optimistic copy; negative = doom, frustration, "broken Jersey" rhetoric. Most political bios skew positive by definition — campaigners selling hope, not despair.
A composite score (0–100) for "did this read like ChatGPT wrote it?" — based on em-dash density, telltale phrases ('delve', 'tapestry', 'multifaceted'), uniform sentence lengths, tricolons, lack of personal anecdote, and lexical predictability. It is a heuristic, not a verdict. Some humans naturally write like LLMs; some LLMs are now better at sounding human.
Top 30 distinguishing words and phrases across all 92 bios (TF-IDF, with party/parish names and generic election-speak filtered out). What people actually talked about — minus the obligatory "I am standing as a candidate".
Bios scored against thirteen issue lexicons. Numbers show total mentions and the share of candidates who raised each issue at least once.
Headline: Housing/cost-of-living and the economy dominate; environment and crime barely register. Government reform and transparency comes up repeatedly but usually as a buzz-phrase rather than a costed proposal.
A small but choice tray of stock political phrases. Tally across all bios. Tick five in a row at your local hustings to win.
Inside any given constituency, are candidates saying genuinely different things — or basically writing the same bio? Cosine similarity (0 = unrelated, 1 = identical) between bios within each constituency. Pick one to inspect.
All 92 candidates, every score. Click a column header to sort. Type to filter.