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

By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

(CNN) — 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.”

That measurement of sentiment doesn’t mean that Trump’s debate performance was itself received poorly in this survey, although other polling designed to measure perceptions of his performance suggests that’s the case among those who tuned in. Rather, it implies that what Americans say about his performance tended to be framed in negative terms.

In the Breakthrough data, even those who expressed support for Trump were often less focused on praising his performance than criticizing what they saw as unfair moderation. “He did a good job considering ABC is a bias[ed] news organization,” a respondent offered.

Also contributing to the negative sentiment surrounding Trump was the tone of responses focusing on immigration. In the most recent data, that largely referred to a debunked viral claim about the town of Springfield, Ohio – first spread by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and then referenced by the former president on the debate stage – that has since led to a wave of racist harassment against the town’s population of Haitian immigrants. In the latest data about what respondents were hearing about Trump, words relating to those claims dwarfed everything but the word “debate” itself.

“During the debate with Kamala Harris he was saying that people are stealing pets and eating them,” one respondent wrote. “I’ll never forget that.”

While some respondents who mentioned the story identified it as false – one described it as “inflammatory and racist misinformation” – others appeared to take the baseless claim at face value. “I’ve seen clips of the debate against Kamala, him basically speaking of the immigrant problems mostly,” another wrote. “Apparently they are eating animals.”

What respondents recalled reading, seeing and hearing about Harris in the past week, meanwhile, largely focused on the debate itself, with words like “watched,” “presidential” and “policies” joining “debate” in the top 10. In its aftermath, the share who mentioned the word “lie” in describing what they heard about Harris rose to its highest point so far in this election cycle and was mentioned by the same number of respondents who used the term in reference to Trump.

A third debate-related angle emerged for Harris as well: the endorsement she received post-debate from Taylor Swift. The superstar singer’s name was the fourth most mentioned term in the post-debate data, and “endorse” ranked tenth.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.