With time ticking down until Election Day, public impressions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have not fully coalesced around any singular enduring news story or political issue, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees.
For the second week in a row, the lion’s share of attention from Americans was on each nominee’s activity on the campaign trail, found the poll, conducted by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan and fielded from October 18-21.
The top activity mentioned for the vice president was sitting for an interview on Fox News, while the former president drew the most attention – though not by an overwhelming margin – for swaying to music onstage for more than 30 minutes at a Pennsylvania rally and for speaking at the Al Smith dinner, a Catholic fundraiser in New York. By contrast, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed any other topic in the final month of the campaign.
The most persistent theme of the 2024 election may be mentions of words such as “lie” and “liar” in conjunction with Trump, who has made numerous false claims over the course of the presidential campaign, including onstage during his debate with Harris and in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Those references have ranked among the top two words mentioned about him for four consecutive weeks. The relative consistency around Trump is a departure from 2016, when the news recalled about him ricocheted among a series of different topics, while the single word “emails” dominated much of the conversation about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton throughout the majority of the election season.
“Donald Trump lies about almost everything,” one respondent wrote in the latest survey.
While “campaigning” was a prominent topic for both Harris and Trump, what that means breaks down differently for each candidate. In the most recent week of data, nearly half of the mentions of campaigning for Harris related to interviews she’d given, compared with about 13% for Trump, who saw more attention on his rallies.
The economy has also emerged as one of the five most frequently mentioned topics for Harris in every week dating to mid-August, although the sentiment of those mentions – whether the terms and tones used are positive or negative – varies across party lines.
“I’ve heard about her wanting to better the economy,” one Democrat wrote in the latest poll, while a Republican wrote that Harris was taking “credit for the economy being strong when, in fact, the economy was strong when Biden/Harris took over and then tanked the economy.”
The poll also finds the level of public attention to the campaign remaining somewhat below previous peaks. While about 7 in 10 Americans said they’d heard at least something about each of the main candidates, respectively, that compares with roughly 8 in 10 or higher in mid-October 2020 and 2016 – and similarly high numbers in July of this year, during the weeks when Trump was targeted by the first of two assassination attempts and President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
Overall, the sentiment behind the words Americans used in describing what they’d heard around each candidate remained more negative than positive – although the sentiment used in describing the news surrounding both Harris and Trump remains considerably less negative than the tone used to describe the final weeks of Biden’s campaign.
CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu contributed to this report.
