In the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, much of the most discussed news around former President Donald Trump revolved around fascism and french fries, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees. Conversations around Vice President Kamala Harris, by contrast, continued to focus largely around broader and more conventional stories about her campaign.
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 25-28. It was completed largely before Trump’s rally last week at Madison Square Garden, which drew particular attention for a racist joke about Puerto Rico included in the opening comedy act.
But the poll found significant public attention to stories about Trump holding an event to serve fries at McDonald’s and allegedly praising Hitler’s generals – as well as making explicit comments about a Hall of Fame golfer.
“He talked about Arnold Palmer’s penis size and worked at a McDonalds for a few hours,” wrote one person who answered the survey. “What a sentence!”
Another survey respondent wrote simply: “When it comes to Donald Trump, you can’t tune him or his ideas off.”
Within the news maelstrom surrounding Trump, the stories that stood out to Americans often divided along partisan lines. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to mention the McDonald’s event, as well as Trump’s interview with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan.
“Numerous former officers in the 2016-2020 Trump administration are sounding alarms that Trump will dismantle democracy if he’s elected,” wrote one Democratic-leaning independent. “Trump has been called out by moderate Republicans for saying he wants military generals ‘like Hitler had.’”
Responses along those lines contributed to making “democracy” the second-most common topic used in discussing Trump in the latest set of data, behind only the broad category of “campaigning.” Roughly 11% of those who’d heard something about Trump in the past few days referenced words relating to democracy, up from only about 1% in the previous week’s data, and well above its placement in any previous week of the survey dating to this summer.
When the survey asked respondents what they’d been hearing about Harris, the words “campaign,” “rally,” “interview,” “polls” and “ad” all cracked the top 10. So did references to her tax proposals. And the poll found an uptick in mentions of the topic of abortion in relation to Harris, with several respondents noting her remarks about reproductive rights during a Houston rally, where she appeared with Beyoncé.
Overall, 74% of Americans reported having heard something recently about Harris, and a similar 71% about Trump – still somewhat on the low side compared with the shares who reported having heard about the candidates at this time during the past two presidential election cycles.
Overall, the sentiment behind the words Americans used in describing what they’d heard about both Trump and Harris remained more negative than positive, with the sentiment around Harris continuing to dip from the earliest days of her campaign. Sentiment doesn’t refer to feelings about the candidates personally, but about how positively or negatively the terms and tones used to describe them tend to be framed.
View this interactive content on CNN.comCNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu contributed to this report.