CNN
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The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump dominated American political attention for the past week, and also helped launch a series of false social media claims about immigration into a sudden nationwide surge.
That’s the latest finding from The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and watching about the presidential candidates during a presidential election cycle.
In the latest poll, conducted September 13-16 by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of researchers from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, more than half of respondents recalled hearing about Harris, and 42% recalled hearing about Trump, but only during the ABC News presidential debate on September 10.
That’s a shift from last week’s tallies, when no topic about either candidate accounted for more than a third of conversations. And it’s notable in a race where, as previous Breakthrough polls have suggested, neither candidate is yet defined in the minds of Americans by a single overarching issue or narrative. The poll was conducted largely before news broke of the second assassination attempt on Trump.
After the debate, the survey found that positive sentiment toward the discussion of Harris rose, while the discussion of Trump became more negative, roughly matching the change in sentiment after the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. Harris has generally been rated more positively on this score than Trump during the campaign, but the gap between the two has widened significantly this week. The recent shift in sentiment is largely driven by reactions to the debates, according to the poll.
“From what I’ve read and seen, most media outlets are reporting that Kamala Harris did well in the debate and is pushing for a second one, but Trump is refusing,” one survey respondent wrote. Another praised her performance, saying, “She dominated the debate. Trump had no idea what hit him.”
This sentiment measure doesn’t mean that Trump’s debate performance itself was received poorly in this survey, which suggests that was the case among viewers in other polls designed to measure perceptions of his performance. Rather, it suggests that what Americans had to say about his performance tended to be phrased in negative terms.
Breakthrough’s data showed that even those who expressed support for Trump were more likely to focus on criticizing what they saw as an unfair host than on praising his performance. “Considering ABC is a biased news organization, he did a good job,” one respondent said.
Adding to the negative sentiment surrounding Trump is the tone of the responses, which focused on immigration, in the latest data, primarily in regards to debunked viral claims about the city of Springfield, Ohio, first spread by Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance and then mentioned by the former president on the debate stage, which have since sparked a wave of racist harassment against the Haitian immigrants living in the city. In the latest data on what respondents had heard about Trump, words related to these claims dwarfed all but the word “debate.”
“During the debate with Kamala Harris he said people steal and eat pets,” one respondent wrote. “I’ll never forget that.”
While some respondents to the story pointed out that it was false (one described it as “inflammatory and racist misinformation”), others seemed to take the unfounded allegation at face value. “I watched the debate footage of Kamala and he was basically talking about immigration,” another wrote. “Apparently they eat animals.”
Meanwhile, what respondents have read, seen or heard about Harris in the past week focused primarily on the debate itself, with words like “saw,” “president” and “policy” joining “debate” in the top 10. In the aftermath of the debate, the percentage of respondents who used the word “lies” to describe what they heard about Harris was the highest it has been so far this election cycle, with as many using the word as about Trump.
A third debate-related aspect also emerged for Harris: her post-debate endorsement from Taylor Swift. The superstar singer’s name was the fourth-most mentioned word in the post-debate data, with “endorsement” coming in at 10th.