Tuesday, I posted a graph of the relative liberalism or conservatism of every State of the Union address since 1986. The person who produced those measures, political scientist Benjamin Lauderdale, kindly sent an updated graph, including Tuesday night’s address.
Via e-mail, Lauderdale wrote to me:
The 2014 Obama speech is very similar in position to all his previous speeches. There are slight changes in the estimated locations of the previous speeches, because the new speech adds some new information about word usage patterns. However, in general, everything looks as it did before.
As Andy Rudalevige noted, this speech was supposed to be different, but in the end, not so much.