The Penta Swing State Snapshot: Key insights from the September 10 debate
In this edition, Penta analyzes the media impact of the September 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, focusing on how it resonated across swing state media channels.
Major debate takeaways:
The debate yielded two key moments that drove media coverage and online discussions both during and after the event:
- Trump’s controversial remark on immigration: During the debate, Trump made a striking claim about incidents in Springfield, OH, alleging that immigrants were "eating the dogs, eating the cats, of the people that live there." This statement quickly became a focal point for both supporters and critics, fueling conversations among cable news analysts and social media platforms alike.
- Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris: Following the debate, Taylor Swift publicly endorsed Vice President Harris through an Instagram post, reaching her 284 million followers worldwide. This move attracted significant media interest and reactions across various channels – driving clicks to vote.org and potentially boosting voter registration.
Media impact and sentiment analysis:
Penta’s Swing State Snapshot analyzed how these two moments influenced swing state media, also tracking the sentiment around both Harris and Trump in the days following the debate.
- Trump’s "cats and dogs" allegation:
While Trump’s remark spurred a short-term spike in visibility,* it failed to sustain momentum on the broader immigration issue. Within two days, coverage began to fade, and abortion once again dominated discussions as the primary issue in swing states. Interestingly, "cats and dogs" remained part of the conversation, detached from the immigration context, suggesting that the controversy around the comment itself outlasted its policy implications.
- Swift’s endorsement – a brief flash:
Taylor Swift’s endorsement generated a noticeable yet brief surge in media coverage. However, this did not translate into a significant boost for Harris' overall visibility in swing state media markets. Trump continued to maintain higher visibility post-debate, while Harris’ media presence remained relatively subdued.
- Harris’ sentiment continues to climb:
Despite lower visibility, Harris' sentiment in swing state media has been on a steady upward trajectory since late August. Notably, when mentioned in swing state newspapers and on television, the tone surrounding Harris is far more favorable compared to Trump’s, underscoring a trend of positive coverage even in the face of limited exposure.
Let the data tell the story
Through Election Day and beyond, Penta will continue to publish updates to the Swing State Snapshot, along with our analysis of what the data reveals about the current state of the 2024 election cycle.
Check out our Penta digital and social platforms for additional content–ranging from dataviz, podcasts, video content, and more.
Swing State Snapshot: Analysis Powered by Penta
The Swing State Snapshot uses Penta’s real-time global media database to track candidate visibility and sentiment of mentions in the largest newspapers and local broadcast television stations in the top three markets in the top seven "swing states," based on their narrow margins of victory during the 2020 presidential election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
*Visibility is Penta's metric for measuring how companies, people, and issues appear in content. The measure incorporates the volume of mentions, the reach and influence of the source, the prominence of the mention in the content, and how relevant the content is to the entity mentioned. Penta has developed a custom Sentiment scoring engine that calculates sentiment of every mention of each candidate on a scale of -100 to +100, trained on billions of records and tuned every day by our analysts.