CNN
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In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s presidential debate, what Americans heard, read and watched about Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump kept coming and going, with the stories that resonated with each candidate shifting from week to week.
This is a different situation from the past two presidential elections: Similar survey results from 2016 and 2020 found that in both elections, news and information reaching Americans about at least one candidate consistently focused on one issue throughout the election: emails around Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic around Trump in 2020. This time around, there has been no such major issue for either candidate since CNN began tracking the results in mid-June.
That’s a key takeaway from the latest data from The Breakthrough, a joint research project between CNN, the University of Michigan and Georgetown University. The survey is conducted by research firms SSRS and Verasight. The survey, which collects responses from a new representative group of roughly 1,000 Americans each week, is conducted every Friday through Monday.
Data collected around the time of the Democratic National Convention showed that the Democratic rally was driving campaign conversation around Harris that week, with people who reported hearing about the Democratic rally using more positive words about it than people who heard about the Republican convention in July at the time.
And throughout Labor Day weekend, discussion of Harris focused primarily on her interview with CNN, her first major interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, for Trump, the latest data showed a spike in mentions of news about his appearance at Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign ignored cemetery officials’ requests not to photograph him in an area reserved for those killed in recent military actions. Mentions of “abortion” also made it into Trump’s top five approval ratings this week, the only policy-related term to make it into the poll since the survey began, aside from a mention of “Project 2025” in mid-July.
The spike in single-topic responses marks a departure from recent trends surrounding Trump in the Breakthrough data. Conversations about Trump’s campaign from after the party convention in mid-July through the end of the Democratic Convention in late August were notable for their lack of a dominant theme or focus on a single new development. Americans who said they had heard of Trump’s campaign used a variety of words, but most often related to the day-to-day happenings of the presidential campaign. In the latest data, mentions of “Arlington” alone were nearly twice as frequent as the week before’s mentions of “campaign,” the most commonly used word for that week.
These campaign-related terms still feature frequently when Americans report what they’ve heard about Trump, but the latest data adds news of the Arlington visit to the mix. In survey data collected a few days after the Democratic National Convention, 25% of respondents mentioned something related to Trump’s campaign, and the next most commonly mentioned topic (opinions about Trump) accounted for 9% of all mentions. In the latest data, 24% mentioned something related to the campaign, and 17% mentioned being exposed to the Arlington visit or the controversy surrounding it.
Overall sentiment in reports of what Americans have seen, read, and heard about each candidate has consistently been more positive for Harris than for Trump, but recent trends indicate that both have at least somewhat more negative than positive sentiment. Over the past two weeks, Harris’ numbers have risen into net positive territory at the Democratic National Convention before dropping back to pre-convention levels in the week since. Harris appears to have received a bigger boost on this metric at the Chicago Democratic Convention than Trump got at the Milwaukee Republican rally.
Comparing data collected immediately after the DNC to data collected immediately after the Republican National Convention, there is a notable difference in overall tone: While the majority of responses from those who said they had heard something about each convention were neutral, those who expressed an opinion were much more positive about Harris after the DNC than they were about Trump after the RNC.
News of Trump’s convention was largely overshadowed in the public eye by the assassination attempt that occurred just before the convention began. In the week following the convention, 61% of respondents mentioned that incident, compared with 23% mentioning the convention. But for Harris, the convention was now her most frequently mentioned topic. About 40% of respondents mentioned convention-related topics, nearly double the next most common topic that week, at 21%, about her own campaign.
In the latest poll, about 7 in 10 Americans say they have heard some news about the two main candidates, roughly the same as the past two weeks. But the upcoming debates could see a shift in those numbers. Immediately after the first presidential debate in late June, the percentage of people who said they had heard something about Trump rose from 77% to 83%, while the percentage who said they had heard news about Joe Biden rose from 71% to 83%. (Biden dropped out of the race the following month and endorsed Harris.)
The latest data also indicates increased attention on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he ended his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say they’ve heard something about Kennedy in the past two weeks, higher than at any point since The Breakthrough began polling impressions of the race in late June. Overall, 61% said they’d heard something about Kennedy in the past week, 20 points higher than the high of 41% before he dropped out of the race.
Indicative of the limited influence his campaign had on the national debate over the presidential election, retreating to Kennedy was more prevalent than any other term throughout the survey period.
CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy and Edward Wu contributed to this report.