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.
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, 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.
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.
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 Kamala Harris and Trump remains considerably less negative than the tone used to describe the final weeks of Biden’s campaign.
