Harris media blitz and Trump campaign rallies capture Americans’ attention

As the 2024 presidential election season enters its final weeks, Kamala Harris is getting attention for a recent string of high-profile interviews, and Donald Trump for his campaign rallies, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees throughout the contest. The survey also finds dishonesty remaining a central theme of the election, with “lies” the most common word used in conjunction with Trump’s campaign.

As the 2024 presidential election season enters its final weeks, Kamala Harris is getting attention for a recent string of high-profile interviews, and Donald Trump for his campaign rallies, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees throughout the contest. The survey also finds dishonesty remaining a central theme of the election, with “lies” the most common word used in conjunction with Trump’s campaign. That divide reflects something about each campaign’s strategy with just over two weeks to go until Election Day. While both Harris and Trump have been holding rallies and speaking with podcasters, Harris has ramped up her media appearances. Trump, meanwhile, has held or will hold large-scale rallies — including ones in solidly blue states like California and New York — that, some of his advisers have argued, draw attention both from the media and from voters who typically tune out political content. The poll, conducted by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, was fielded from October 11-14. During that time, the survey found, both candidates remained squarely in the public eye: 69% of Americans reported having heard, read or seen something related to Harris over the previous week, while a similar 73% said the same about Trump. And for both of them, mentions of the broadly defined topic of “campaigning” outpaced anything else. Mentions of the campaign made up 36% of the responses about Harris, and 28% of the responses about Trump, a 10-point rise for each candidate compared with the start of the month. But the specifics for each candidate differed. The word most commonly used in describing the news about Harris was “interview,” with Americans referencing her appearances on CBS’ “60 Minutes” and the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” as well as interviews with Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert. The audiences for these appearances, the poll suggests, often varied broadly – the average age of respondents mentioning “Call Her Daddy” in reference to Harris was 32, for instance, while the average age of those mentioning “60 Minutes” was 52. “(I) have heard many things about Kamala Harris in the last days,” one respondent wrote. “She is doing the media blitz everyone wanted.”