We asked Americans what they’d heard about Trump and Harris throughout the campaign. Here’s what they told us

By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

(CNN) — Americans heard starkly different messages about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the 2024 election, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracked what average Americans actually heard, read and saw about the presidential nominees throughout the general election campaign.

In the final pre-election survey, fielded from November 1 through 4, the single word most associated with Trump’s winning campaign was “garbage.” That incorporated references to several stories: the racist joke about Puerto Rico told by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the former president’s own comment that the US was “like a garbage can for the world” and Trump’s seizing of a garbled remark from President Joe Biden to hold a news conference from inside a garbage truck while wearing a yellow safety vest and then rallying in the same attire with supporters.

The most common words used about the final days of the Harris campaign were, by contrast, remarkably generic: “campaign,” “rally” and “ad.”

The most commonly used phrase about Trump in the final week was “garbage truck,” versus “middle class” for Harris – but mentions of the former were roughly twice as common as the latter, suggesting relatively little consensus about the closing narrative of the vice president’s campaign.

The data doesn’t necessarily offer a clear-cut story about Trump’s path to victory, either. It may, in fact, suggest some limits as to how much a siloed news environment can affect vote choice in an election where partisans often diverged in their recounting of current events and where roughly 8 in 10 voters said in exit polling that they made up their minds sometime prior to September.

But the project, conducted by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, provides one account of how the nation experienced the campaign. In the abbreviated race between Harris and Trump, the research found, the single presidential debate between the two nominees in September was perhaps the last campaign event to draw truly universal attention.

What also stands out in the charts over time is the lack of a sustained narrative about either candidate. That partially echoes 2016, when researchers found that “there was no single persistent negative theme that emerged when we asked people daily what they had read, seen or heard about Trump.” That, Gallup’s Frank Newport wrote four years ago, “reflected his campaign’s ability to define news coverage through attention-getting tactics that defied existing norms of political decorum, and the inability of the opposing campaign … to come up with a powerful negative narrative to use against him.”

But the parallels to 2016 are far from absolute. In 2024, while no single story stuck to Trump, the overarching word “lie” did, reaching the top five words associated with him in all but one week of the election’s final two months. And notably, while impressions of Hillary Clinton in 2016 were consistently dominated by stories about her emails, no topic – positive or negative – filled a similar role for Harris in 2024.

On average, over the 20 weeks The Breakthrough survey was fielded this year, roughly 76% of US adults said weekly they’d heard at least some news about Trump. In the 15 full weeks of data following Harris’ entry into the race, a slightly smaller share – about 71% on average – said they’d heard something about her. There was less of a disparity in the final week of the campaign when roughly three-quarters of Americans reported reading, hearing or seeing at least something about each candidate – 76% for Trump and 74% for Harris.

Those numbers also suggest that the scope of the public’s attention actually narrowed as the calendar moved further into the fall. In July, the share who’d heard news about Trump topped out at 89% following the first assassination attempt against him, while the share hearing about Biden peaked at 84% in the wake of his presidential debate performance and subsequent decision to leave the race. The share with something to say about Harris never rose higher than the 77% she hit in mid-August.

That pattern – a peak focus during the summer and a decline during the election’s final days – also stands out from the past two elections. In 2020, the share of voters reporting they’d heard news about Trump and Biden rose modestly but mostly steadily throughout the fall; attention in 2016 was more sporadic but peaked in mid-October.

The Breakthrough project also tracked the sentiment of survey responses – that is, not the feelings Americans expressed about the candidates personally, but whether the terms and tone they used to frame what they’d heard tended to be more positive or negative. In the first months after Harris entered the race, her sentiment score was more positive than Trump’s, the poll found. But that distinction largely faded in the last month of the campaign. Although Harris saw a small uptick in the final week before Election Day, sentiment scores for both candidates remained well under water.

Sentiments expressed by political independents when talking about the news surrounding Trump were negative throughout the campaign. Their sentiment when discussing what they’d heard about Harris, which was close to neutral at the start of her candidacy, declined modestly throughout the fall, undercutting her advantage over Trump on that metric.

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

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