As a follow up to our post analyzing former Mayor Mike Duggan’s last State of the City (SOTC) address, we ran our analysis on a transcript of current Mayor Sheffield’s first address to the city to see what differences, if any, appeared in the data. 

This analysis is done by running an exact keyword analysis on the transcript text which, as we noted previously, has its own strengths and weaknesses which reflect in the results. If you would like to see how we set up our analysis and potentially alter our matching dictionary, you can do so by going to our Github repository and pulling the data and scripts for your own version. 

That said, here are the results of the analysis for 2026:

You can see immediately that there is a sharp decline in the number of matches overall. This may be a reflection of a shift in priorities or more simply, a change in speaking patterns leading to a change in results. The keyword dictionary we have was built up in conjunction with reviewing years of Duggan’s SOTC addresses which makes that a likely scenario. In time, it is likely we would be able to tailor the keyword dictionary to Sheffield’s speaking style and run it against both mayor’s speeches.

However, some changes are large enough that they’re worth mentioning. Parks, for example, was a regular focus for Duggan having received regular mentions in his speeches averaging over 19 mentions per speech. Sheffield, on the other hand, barely mentioned them with just four mentions in her inaugural speech. 

Jobs too were mentioned significantly less having been mentioned only 15 times while Duggan averaged more than 52 times for the category. Additionally, and thankfully, blight was barely a topic that matched up with Sheffield’s speech being brought up just four times compared to Duggan’s average of 26 times per speech. Both topics had the lowest frequency on record in this speech.

While Duggan has had twelve years on the job and has shifted focus in the speech over the years, when we look at the two first year speeches side by side, differences remain.

Where Duggan focused on Jobs, Safety, and Buses, Sheffield focused on Schools, Neighborhood, Housing, and Finance as topics.  

Time will tell whether some of these changes were just a reflection of a new mayor taking the reins after a twelve year incumbent leader or whether they mark a new direction for the City of Detroit and a different set of priorities entirely.