How the Trump-Harris debate dominated Americans’ political conversation and elevated false claims about migrants

The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump dominated Americans’ political attention in the week that followed. It also served to elevate a set of false social media claims about migrants to sudden national prevalence.

The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump dominated Americans’ political attention in the week that followed. It also served to elevate a set of false social media claims about migrants to sudden national prevalence. That’s the latest from The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential candidates throughout the campaign. In the most recent survey – conducted Sept. 13-16 by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan – more than half of what respondents remembered hearing about Harris, and 42% of what they remembered hearing about Trump, revolved around the ABC News presidential debate held September 10. That’s a shift from data collected the previous week, when no topic dominated more than a third of the conversation about either candidate. And it’s notable in a race in which neither candidate has yet been defined in Americans’ minds by any single, overarching issue or story, as previous Breakthrough surveys have suggested. The poll was conducted largely before news broke of an apparent second assassination attempt on Trump’s life. Following the debate, the survey tracked a rise in positive sentiment around discussions of Harris, while the conversation around Trump trended more negatively – roughly, the mirror image of the shift in sentiments following the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. And although Harris has generally scored more positively than Trump on this score throughout her time in the race, the difference between them grew markedly this week. The most recent shifts in sentiment, the poll found, were driven largely by responses to the debate. “From what I’ve been reading and seeing, most outlets are saying Kamala Harris did well in the debate, and she’s been pushing for a second one, but Trump is refusing,” one respondent to the survey wrote. Another praised her performance, “She wiped the floor at the debate. Trump didn’t know what hit him.”