A survey asked what Americans were hearing most about the candidates. One of the most common words for Trump was ‘liar’

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.

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.