How the Trump-Harris debate dominated US political debate and fueled false claims about migrants

CNN
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The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump dominated American political attention in the week that followed. It also helped elevate a series of false claims on social media about migrants to sudden national prominence.

That’s the latest poll from The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans actually hear, read and see about the presidential candidates throughout the campaign.

In the most recent poll — 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 recalled hearing about Harris, and 42 percent of what they recalled hearing about Trump, revolved around the ABC News presidential debate on Sept. 10.

That’s a shift from data collected the week before, when no single topic dominated more than a third of conversations about either candidate. And it’s remarkable in a race where neither candidate has yet been defined in Americans’ minds by a single, overarching issue or story, as previous Breakthrough polls have suggested. The poll was conducted largely before news of an apparent second attempt on Trump’s life broke.

After the debate, the survey found a spike in positive sentiment around Harris, while conversations around Trump tended to be more negative — roughly mirroring the shift in sentiment following the debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. And while Harris has generally scored more positively than Trump on this measure throughout her campaign, the gap between them widened significantly this week. The most recent shifts in sentiment, the poll found, were driven largely by responses to the debate.

“From what I’ve read and seen, most media outlets say Kamala Harris did well in the debate, and she’s been pushing for a second one, but Trump refuses,” wrote one survey respondent. Another praised her performance: “She swept the floor in the debate. Trump didn’t know what hit him.”

This measure of sentiment does not mean that Trump’s debate performance was poorly received in this poll, although other polls designed to measure perceptions of his performance suggest that this is the case among those who watched the show. Rather, it implies that what Americans say about his performance tends to be couched in negative terms.

In Breakthrough’s data, even those who expressed support for Trump were often less focused on praising his performance than on criticizing what they saw as unfair moderation. “He did a good job considering ABC is a biased news organization,” one respondent said.

The tone of the immigration-focused responses also contributed to negative sentiment toward Trump. In the most recent data, it was largely a viral, debunked claim about the city of Springfield, Ohio — first spread by Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance and then referenced by the former president during the debate — that has since led to a wave of racist harassment against the city’s Haitian immigrant population. In the latest data on what respondents were hearing about Trump, the words related to those claims all but eclipsed the word “debate” itself.

“During the debate with Kamala Harris, he said people were stealing pets and eating them,” one participant wrote. “I’ll never forget that.”

While some respondents called the information false — one called it “racist and inflammatory misinformation” — others seemed to take the baseless claim at face value. “I’ve seen clips of the Kamala debate where he basically talks about immigrant issues,” wrote another. “Apparently they eat animals.”

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

A third aspect of the debate also emerged for Harris: the support she received after the debate from Taylor Swift. The superstar singer’s name was the fourth most-mentioned term in the post-debate data, with “support” coming in at tenth.