Voters on the Left and Right Agree: The America They Knew Is Slipping Away

The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm elections felt so significant to Shane Dunn that he cast his first ballot at 65.

The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm elections felt so significant to Shane Dunn that he cast his first ballot at 65.

Dunn, a lifelong cook who worked along the East Coast, recently settled in suburban Philadelphia and voted in Levittown last week. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside the polling station. Now, he added, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.”

He voted for Democrats. “It feels great, to put my word in,” Dunn said, tapping the “I Voted” sticker affixed to his black hoodie.

Across the country, voters are making their voices heard as they decide which party will control the Senate and House, as well as governors’ offices, state legislatures and other leadership posts during the final two years of Republican Donald Trump’s presidency.

For many, the election reflects a fear that the America they recognize is steadily disappearing.

They point to lawlessness among the people who write and enforce the laws, politicians inflaming hostility between neighbors, corruption seemingly everywhere, billionaires wielding outsized power and a political culture disconnected from everyday life. In their view, the foundations of the country are under strain — and soaring gas prices only add to the frustration.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with voters casting ballots at early-voting sites and drop boxes nationwide, the anxiety was unmistakable. It was most intense among Trump’s opponents, though many of his supporters expressed deep concerns of their own.

A vote cast to stop the ‘madness’

“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59. His food-importing and marketing business has been damaged by tariffs. After submitting his mail ballot at the Dauphin County election bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he said he voted for Democrats.

In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, voted inside Woodbury County’s historic Prairie-style courthouse. She left troubled by a range of issues, including chemicals in processed food, her son’s difficulty obtaining veterans’ benefits and, above all, what she views as the country’s shift to the left. To Marlett, society also appears badly damaged.

“Family values are going by the wayside, and they need to be brought back,” she said. “Our liberties have been stomped all over. Religion has been stomped all over. And I believe we in the majority need to step up and stop being silent.” She voted Republican.

Voters despair at the anger fueled by Trump and his allies

For some voters, the anger unleashed by a president known for profanity and an unwillingness to tolerate criticism has become unbearable.

“He’s just destroying us,” said Linda Markle, 72, a Democrat, outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

“I am so afraid for this country,” she said. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”

“All people do now is just hate each other,” Markle said, arguing that Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that.” The division, she added, is “horrible, absolutely horrible,” and she said she could not wait to see him leave office.

Republican Chris Smith, a 27-year-old software engineer from Harrisburg who voted for Trump in 2024, said he understood Markle’s view — up to a point.

“A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” Smith said. He added, “I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.” Still, Smith supports Trump’s push to bring manufacturing back to the United States and agrees with the aims of his tariffs. He voted Republican because he continues to regard the party as more fiscally responsible than the Democrats.

In Ohio, Lori Wilkinson, a retired home health worker from New Pittsburg, and her husband, David, a janitor, describe themselves as independents. David recently wrote to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to praise his performance, and the couple had previously voted for Republican George W. Bush for president.

But their view of Trump is starkly different. “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said at the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’” Lori was equally blunt: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She worries that a sweeping Democratic victory Tuesday could cause Trump to “go fricking berserk.”

Some pretend Trump is on the ballot

Despite his striking unpopularity in polls, Trump repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he’s on the midterm ballot, betting that would motivate fans to vote who otherwise might not. But that cuts both ways.

Samontae Mwangi, 20, and his brother, Gathenya Mwangi, 19, voted for the first time, casting early ballots Tuesday at their election center in Topeka, Kansas. Both work at a plant that manufactures trackside buildings for railroads.

They went with their grandfather, Lynn Henderson, 68, a retired Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. worker and a former Marine lance corporal who wore a Marine’s cap. Henderson said he took his grandsons to vote because his own mother died recently and he wanted them to have an event to remember him when he’s gone.

All three are hoping that the election produces Democratic victories and political change. Gathenya said the economy and discontent with Trump could motivate people who’ve voted in the past to show up, as well as those who never have. “It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” he said.

Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager, pulled up to the center in a van featuring a decorative license plate with an American eagle. The strong Trump supporter is the daughter of Democrats. Illegal immigration is her top issue.

“I think Trump is kind of our last hope, because otherwise this world’s going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. “Yeah, he says stupid stuff, but, you know, so do we.”

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In the Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Henrico County, voters arrived at a steady clip on a crisp fall afternoon a week from Election Day. The moment of decision found one conservative couple, Joan and Frank Bark, lamenting the country’s direction.

“I’m afraid Trump has gotten so egotistical, it’s affecting his ability to make intelligent or more favorable decisions,” Frank said. But, he said, “I don’t want the decisions that would be generated from that far left side, either.”

Joan, a retiree like her husband, said of Democrats: “I haven’t found very much that they want to change or work with. It’s just mostly, ‘I hate Trump.’” But Trump really isn’t on the ballot. They voted for Republican candidates.

In Nanuet, New York, people streamed into the small room of a community center to vote; some were in Halloween costumes. Primrose D. Sullivan, a nurse, is an independent. She scoffed at Trump’s wish that voters act as if he’s running.

“No, because he’s not,” she said. “When a patient comes into the hospital, you want me dealing in facts, not in, ‘Hmm, let me act like you might have cancer.’ No. Do you or do you not have cancer? We need to proceed based on facts.” She voted for Democrats.

Yet some see a cancer on politics, if not the presidency

Sullivan was among a number of voters who singled out the billionaires Trump has made common cause with and how that might feed into American decline.

“I don’t begrudge any of our wealthy people, Jeff Bezos or, you know, Elon Musk,” she said. “But I do have a certain problem with them wanting more and more and doing things that really don’t help humanity.”

“If we keep going the way these guys are going,” she went on, meaning both the political and CEO classes, “we’re not going to have anything like what we had in the past.” Theirs is a “self-destructive attitude,” she added, “because, honestly, if the whole planet destroys itself, the wealthy go with us.”

Outside the polling station at the YMCA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, Benjamin Updegraft offered a piercing denunciation of the elite as he traced his evolution from a “full-throated young Republican” who voted for Trump as a young man in 2016 to a “lifetime Democrat,” after casting his ballot in the Senate race.

He cited Musk’s throttling of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, which disrupted a key defense against Russian attacks, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad in the Ohio governor’s race featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton among the reasons powerful men must be brought to heel.

“That needs to be cut out from this country like a cancer,” Updegraft said. “We have an incredible responsibility to take back the stranglehold that the worst people in this country have on the reins of power and to inflict punishment on them for their actions.”

In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee described his conservative upbringing, his past voting for Republicans and now his decision to turn against that party and vote Democratic in the contested races for governors and the House. He considers Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement to be lawless.

“Nobody wants open borders, but you’re treating these people without due process, sending people to countries they don’t even belong to,” said Lee, 63. “There’s no more rules.”

Then there are those prices. And that war

The Trump supporters interviewed by the AP at the polls signaled their tolerance of the surge of gas prices from the Iran war, in some cases blaming factors other than the actual cause. Nor did they break with him on the war itself.

Among them was David Stouffer, 59, branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, who spoke outside the Harrisburg elections office. “Iran has been killing Americans for 50 freaking years,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll suffer with some higher gas prices in the interim until they get that nonsense figured out.”

Does that put a crunch on your household budget, Stouffer was asked. “Of course it does.” How to cope with that? “I just keep driving.”

“He’s made the tax cuts real,” Stouffer said. “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”

By the dozens, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some of them granted the president his achievements on taxes and immigration.

Horner, the food importer, is going “bonkers” with the tariffs and all the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts while a “feckless” and now electorally endangered Republican Congress largely stands aside.

“You can’t do business when every month you have to readjust your pricing because the president gets a wild hair on something that he’s not even constitutionally allowed to do,” Horner said. He added, “He’s just playing out the clock on all of this stuff — where you just know he knows it’s wrong.

“And what do we have? Higher healthcare, higher food, higher gas, a business environment that is complete chaos.”

But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a suburb of Harrisburg, wants as much of Trump as he can get. Alas, “he can’t run again,” Casner noted.

“Well, technically,” Casner said, “he can’t run again.”

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.; Levy from Harrisburg, Pa.; Catalini from Levittown, Pa.; and Woodward from Washington. Associated Press journalists Julie Carr Smyth in Wooster, Ohio; Erik Verduzco in Fort Mill, S.C.; Thomas Beaumont in Sioux City, Iowa; Joseph Frederick in Nanuet, N.Y.; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Warminster, Pa.; Mikella Schuettler in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Sarah Rankin in Henrico, Va., contributed to this report.