Harris media blitz and Trump campaign rallies capture Americans’ attention

CNN
 — 

As the 2024 presidential election season enters its final weeks, Kamala Harris is getting attention for a recent string of high-profile interviews, and Donald Trump for his campaign rallies, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees throughout the contest. The survey also finds dishonesty remaining a central theme of the election, with “lies” the most common word used in conjunction with Trump’s campaign.

That divide reflects something about each campaign’s strategy with just over two weeks to go until Election Day. While both Harris and Trump have been holding rallies and speaking with podcasters, Harris has ramped up her media appearances. Trump, meanwhile, has held or will hold large-scale rallies — including ones in solidly blue states like California and New York — that, some of his advisers have argued, draw attention both from the media and from voters who typically tune out political content.

The poll, conducted by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, was fielded from October 11-14. During that time, the survey found, both candidates remained squarely in the public eye: 69% of Americans reported having heard, read or seen something related to Harris over the previous week, while a similar 73% said the same about Trump.

And for both of them, mentions of the broadly defined topic of “campaigning” outpaced anything else. Mentions of the campaign made up 36% of the responses about Harris, and 28% of the responses about Trump, a 10-point rise for each candidate compared with the start of the month.

But the specifics for each candidate differed. The word most commonly used in describing the news about Harris was “interview,” with Americans referencing her appearances on CBS’ “60 Minutes” and the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” as well as interviews with Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert. The audiences for these appearances, the poll suggests, often varied broadly – the average age of respondents mentioning “Call Her Daddy” in reference to Harris was 32, for instance, while the average age of those mentioning “60 Minutes” was 52.

“(I) have heard many things about Kamala Harris in the last days,” one respondent wrote. “She is doing the media blitz everyone wanted.”

By contrast, when Americans were asked to describe the news about Trump, “rally” was the second-most commonly word used in response. Responses mentioned events that Trump held in cities ranging from Aurora, Colorado, to Coachella, California, as well as his plan for an upcoming rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

“I follow him on Instagram,” wrote another respondent. “He’s been posting all of his political rallies there.”

Democrats, in particular, were also likely to mention Detroit. During remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump called the city a “developing area,” warning that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Harris wins the presidency.

The poll’s field dates came just after Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida — and, like the survey conducted a week prior, it found substantial attention to recent storms, with “hurricane” among the top five words used in relation to both candidates. When Republicans talked about Trump’s hurricane response, it was often in conjunction with the words “victim” or “help,” the poll found, while Democrats were more likely to mention it in the context of his spreading hurricane disinformation.

The survey’s results mark the fifth consecutive week during which “lie” was one of the top five words used in discussing Trump, and the first time it topped the list.

“I just hear him talking at his rallies on TV and all he does is LIE!” one respondent wrote.

The word has also been a fixture in responses relating to Harris, though neither as consistently nor as prominently. And the poll also finds that the sentiment of responses using the word “lie” is somewhat less negative when it comes to Harris than Trump — possibly a reflection of some respondents using it in the context of Harris being lied about, rather than lying to others.

“I heard she is a liar,” one respondent wrote. “She isn’t assisting with any of the two hurricanes that has happened in our nation.”

Another wrote: “I read that Kamala Harris is pleading for people to stop lying about the hurricane relief and hurricane control.”

The sentiment behind the words Americans used to describe what they’d heard about Harris remained modestly more positive than the words they used to describe the news about Trump, but by a far smaller margin than the gaps seen following the Democratic National Convention and the ABC presidential debate. Sentiment doesn’t refer to feelings about the candidates personally, but about how positively or negatively the terms and tones used to describe them tend to be framed.

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu contributed to this report.

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