CNN
—

As time ticks down to Election Day, public impressions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have not fully coalesced around any singular and enduring news or political issue, according to The Breakthrougha CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans actually hear, read and see about the presidential candidates.

For the second week in a row, the majority of Americans’ attention focused on each candidate’s campaign performance, according to the poll, conducted by SSRS and Verasight on behalf of a research team from CNN, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan. and played from October 18-21.

The top activity mentioned for the vice president was the meeting for an interview on Fox Newswhile the former president drew the most attention—though not by an overwhelming margin—for swaying to the music on stage for more than 30 minutes at a rally in Pennsylvania and for speaking at dinner Al Smitha New York Catholic fundraiser. Instead, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed every other topic in the last month of the campaign.

The most persistent theme of the 2024 election may be the mention of words like “lie” and “liar” along with Trump, who has made numerous false claims throughout the presidential campaign, including on stage during the presidential campaign. his debate with Harris and in after Hurricane Helene. Those references ranked among the top two words mentioned about him for four consecutive weeks. The relative consistency around Trump is a departure from 2016when news mentions of him bounced around in a number of different threads, while the single word “emails” dominated much of conversation about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton throughout most of the election season.

“Donald Trump lies about almost everything,” wrote one respondent in the most recent poll.

While “campaigning” was a prominent topic for both Harris and Trump, what that means breaks down differently for each candidate. In the most recent week of data, nearly half of campaign mentions for Harris were about interviews she gave, compared with about 13 percent for Trump, who saw more attention on his rallies.

The economy has also become one of the five most frequently mentioned topics by Harris each week since mid-August, although the sentiment of those mentions — whether the terms and tones used are positive or negative — varies across political lines. party.

“I’ve heard about her wanting to improve the economy,” one Democrat wrote in the most recent poll, while one Republican wrote that Harris is taking “credit for the strong economy when in fact the economy was strong when Biden/Harris took over and then affected the economy.”

The survey also finds that the level of public attention to the campaign remains somewhat below previous peaks. While about 7 in 10 Americans said they had heard at least something about each of the leading candidates, respectively, that compares with about 8 in 10 or more. in the middle of October 2020 and 2016 — and similarly high numbers in July of this year, in the weeks when Trump was targeted by the first of two assassination attempts and President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.

Overall, the sentiment behind the words Americans used to describe what they heard surrounding each candidate remained more negative than positive — though the sentiment used to describe the news about Harris and Trump remains considerably less negative than the tone used to describe the ending. weeks of Biden’s campaign.

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu contributed to this report.