How hurricane season is affecting the way Americans are following the Trump-Harris race

With the election less than a month away, the public’s attention has shifted to the candidates’ responses to hurricane season, according to The Breakthrough, a CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are actually hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees throughout the campaign. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign also faced renewed focus on his legal troubles in the wake of a new filing by federal prosecutors, the survey finds.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, which has killed more than 230 people across the southeastern United States, “hurricane” was the word most frequently mentioned when respondents were asked what they’d heard about Trump. It was the second-most frequent word mentioned when they were asked about Vice President Kamala Harris, second only to “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 4-7, before Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on Wednesday night.

Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to mention the hurricane when talking about Harris – although their perspectives on her response often differed sharply.

Harris “was working with FEMA on providing assistance and recovery for the areas affected by Hurricane Helene,” one Democratic respondent wrote, while another credited her with having done “a great job of consoling hurricane victims in Georgia.”

By contrast, a Republican respondent wrote about hearing that Harris “is only paying $750 to those whose homes are being devastated in the hurricanes, yet sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel.” The $750 is an apparent reference to a payment program at the Federal Emergency Management Agency that has been mischaracterized by Trump and others as the only assistance FEMA is providing.

Republicans were far likelier than Democrats to mention the hurricane in conjunction with Trump. When Democrats were asked what they’d recently heard about the GOP presidential nominee, they were more likely than Republicans to mention his response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, or simply use the word “lie.”

In the latest set of data, Americans also mentioned the October 5 rally Trump held in Butler, Pennsylvania – the site of the first assassination attempt against him this summer. And they referenced two other names in conjunction with him: Elon Musk, who appeared onstage with Trump in Butler, and Jack Smith, the special counsel whose recently unsealed legal brief laid out the government’s sweeping case against the former president for his effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Roughly 14% of respondents who’d heard something about Trump referenced words related to his legal issues, up from 7% in the previous wave of data and the highest share to do so since early September, when the sentencing in his New York criminal case was delayed until after the 2024 election.

Asked about Harris, 8% of respondents who’d heard something about her mentioned words relating to endorsements – in this case, largely a reference to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, who announced his support of her last month, and his daughter Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who recently appeared with Harris on the campaign trail. Harris also previously saw bursts of attention after endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift.

The sentiment behind the words Americans used to describe what they’d heard about Harris remained modestly more positive than the words they used to describe the news about Trump. This doesn’t mean that they expressed warmer feelings about Harris personally but that what they said about her tended to be framed in relatively positive terms and tone. The tone of responses relating to both candidates were overall more negative than positive.