Winston Peters wins the airtime battle in first leaders debate, but who won the war?

In a debate where Winston Peters and David Seymour flexed their political muscle, newcomer Qiulae Wong struggled for airtime but stood out in different ways.Analysis: Since polls started regularly suggesting Opportunity may have a kingmaking position after the November 7 election, leader Qiulae Wong has had a good chunk of airtime in interviews across all the major media outlets.The first televised leaders debate of the campaign last night, however, was a whole different affair.Wong was on stage for the The Press Kingmakers' debate directly alongside political veteran and NZ First leader Winston Peters, who she has directly challenged for the kingmaker role. ACT's David Seymour, Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, and Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, were also there and all experienced in the format.Peters appeared to relish his status as the old hand, even leaning into it as part of his pitch that experience is so important in politics. He had knowing exchanges with the moderators, lots of lessons to share from decades past and got the most words in. Wong, on the other hand, was the only person to mention words like 'climate' or 'environment' and RNZ's analysis found she used the highest proportion of positive words and the lowest proportion of negative.Who talked the most?Peters chalked up 3013 discernable words during the debate compared to second place Seymour's 2781.Waititi said 2122 words and Swarbrick and Wong both fewer than 2000. At just 1045 words, Wong spoke roughly a third of the words as Peters.The percentage of words Peters spoke was in line with his performances in debates in 2020 and 2023.The length of answers varied among speakers, with Seymour giving the longest uninterrupted answer of the night of 239 words against policies to buy or break up supermarkets.Issues with the health system were the topic of Swarbrick's longest answer, where she talked about the lack of hospital beds and ambulance "ramping".The longest answer from Peters was in response to modertor Andrea Vance's question on whether the prime minister should have more license to sack coalition ministers. He pointed to the Greens and Te Pāti Māori losing MPs and said the responsibility was to provide a stable government, and he referenced time spent in government with Helen Clark."I think that was a no," was Vance's interpretation of his 171 word answer.Waititi's longest answer related to opportunities for Māori in small business, and Wong's longest answer was 124 words related to artificial intelligence.Peters dominated speaking turns as well as overall wordcount. A 'speaking turn' is counted as each time six words or more were spoken in a row by one of the leaders.Peters was way out in front on this measure, taking nearly double the next highest, Seymour and almost triple Wong's tally.On average, however, Peters' turns ran to 46 words, compared with 77 for Seymour.What was saidThere were words the leaders said over and over again. "Well" was the top word for Peters and Wong. "People" was Seymour's top word, followed by "going", then "well". Waititi's most used word was Māori.Of the leaders, Peters said the highest number of unique words (936), followed by Seymour (919). Wong and Waititi said the fewest, with 417 and 606 respectively.RNZ counted how many times each leader used certain words which relate to key topics. Māori, health and tax were mentioned the most, at 23 times each. The economy was mentioned 18 times.Wong was the only leader to mention climate, environment and emissions - all once each. She was also the only one to mention Kiwisaver.The word "treaty" was mentioned once by Waititi.What was the vibe?According to a language sentiment data dictionary, which rates words as either positive, neutral or negative, Wong came out on top for positive language, with 6 percent of words she used classed as positive. She scored the lowest of all the leaders for negative words.Waititi used the lowest percentage for positive words and Seymour used the highest percentage of negative words.How we analysed the data: The debate was transcribed by Otter.ai and then manually cleaned to improve accuracy. Cross talk - where debate participants spoke over each other was removed where words were unintelligible. Interjections when intelligible were included. Text was analysed using R and the Quanteda package.