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

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.

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.