Some readers fear the Trump administration will contest the election results
Millions of Americans will vote on 3 November in midterm elections that will determine control of the Republican-held House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships of 36 states. Early voting was already under way: the Guardian’s account was illustrated with a photograph of a person filling in a ballot in early voting in Cary, North Carolina, on 25 October. In reader accounts published on 31 October, voters told the Guardian that the cost of living, the war in Iran, artificial intelligence and big tech, climate change, immigration enforcement and the integrity of the election itself are shaping their choices.
The Guardian described mounting public frustration over the rising cost of living, immigration, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, big tech and the country’s overseas wars heading into the vote. President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36%, according to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted this month, and inflation stands at 3.7%, the Guardian reported. One respondent characterized the country under the Trump administration as a “rogue nation, ungoverned by the rule of law.” The Guardian noted that some respondents shared only a first name or declined to share their name for privacy reasons.
For many respondents, the cost of living sits at the center of their midterm thinking. Kathryn Warren, a retired staff member with Dare County Schools who lives on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, said she and her husband had already voted early. “We are dying on the vine in this economy,” Warren said, adding that the cost of gas in her remote area takes “a big chunk” of the couple’s Social Security and that “groceries and medicine are outrageous.” “The medicine that keeps me alive costs $7,000 a month before insurance. In what world is that reasonable?” she said.
A 36-year-old counselor in Tennessee described financial pressures compounded by chronic illness. She said a migraine medication — the first in 24 years of chronic migraines to reduce her pain levels, leaving no cheaper alternative, in her account — costs nearly $2,000 out of pocket for a month’s supply, and that her insurance had agreed to pay for five months only. “I find it absurd and financially prohibitive to spend that much on medication every month,” she said. She also said she is concerned about the country “sliding into an authoritarian state.”
Vicki Stein, a 66-year-old retired marketing communications professional from Alpine Township, Michigan, said she had already voted for Democrats across the ticket. “Working Americans can’t afford healthcare, let alone gas nor groceries due to tariffs, and children are losing Snap benefits while we blow our gold on [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war,” Stein said. She added that “we can’t even trust our lettuce” under the administration’s [Department of Health and Human Services] — a reference, the Guardian noted, to a cyclospora outbreak across 27 states this summer that was traced to contaminated lettuce.
George, a 23-year-old business school graduate in Houston, criticized what he called “Trump’s idiotic tariff scheme” and said “the priorities of both parties are clearly more in line with billionaires than regular people.” He said it had been heartening to see politicians such as James Talarico “abandon that side of politics to focus on affordability and quality of life for average Americans,” adding: “Who cares about 1% of the population when everyone is struggling?”
The war in Iran and US military aid to Israel ran through the responses. The Guardian reported that opposition to the war and to aid for Israel remains a driving concern among voters. George called for the US to divest from Israel: “Billions upon billions of American taxpayer dollars spent on killing children,” he said, arguing that “all we get from our investment in Israel is a mountain of dead bodies.” He said any politician who refuses Aipac money or promises to stop funding what he called Israel’s “perma-war” would have his vote and, he added, those of many other Americans.
Joel Young, a 66-year-old retired civil litigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said “the single most important issue in any election for federal office is whether the candidate or incumbent will approve another dollar, weapon, or material to support Israel.” He described US policy as cover for what he called Israel’s “apartheid regime and program of ethnic cleansing in place since 1948, which has now clearly become genocidal.”
A 30-year-old machine operator and father in Bogalusa, Louisiana, who said he voted for Trump in 2024, called the war “evil” and said it “must end.” “Every day it continues is another day that the president scandalizes our service members, taxpayers and nation,” he said, accusing the war of “stealing present day purchasing power from embattled American workers,” of “stealing future prosperity from our children through a climbing national debt” and of “stealing tranquility from people in the Middle East.”
Beyond economics and foreign policy, respondents raised the influence of AI and big tech. Dave Neps, a 74-year-old retired teacher in Georgia, said he is “concerned about the AI financial bubble.” “This market reminds me of the dotcom crash in the late 90s and the financial crash in 2008,” said Neps, who said he and his wife lost money in both. Looking ahead to a pension, he said he sees “a country that’s heavily invested in AI that so many of us don’t want” and predicted the industry will “turn it into another commodity that we’ll have to pay for like cable TV.”
Joy, a 47-year-old insurance executive in north Georgia, said technology companies are “buying off local officials” to build datacenters in her rural area, with county and city representatives “ignoring their constituents and offering massive tax incentives.” She called for datacenter moratoriums.
The climate crisis and environmental protection were also prominent concerns, particularly among older respondents who described witnessing the degradation of natural spaces over their lifetimes. David Tucker, a 57-year-old registered nurse in Washington state, said the climate crisis and public lands protection are his main concerns, along with protecting democracy and healthcare funding cuts. He said he grew up in Utah and spent time camping and fishing with his parents and siblings on public forests and deserts, and that “natural spaces and our ecosystem are essential for our survival.”
Kaye, a 71-year-old resident of Bothell, Washington, called Trump “evil and incompetent in so many ways” but said the degradation of the planet is her greatest concern “as it is larger than all of us and we’re so close to a tipping point that will be catastrophic.” She said she is “old enough to have known a world with more birds and animal species; where the forests, coasts and plains were so much more alive,” describing humanity’s “vile destruction of the land that feeds us” as tragic.
A 78-year-old Washington resident called the climate crisis the “biggest threat to the planet,” one that “causes suffering, disease, fear, inequality,” and said her vote will go to “a candidate with a clear track record of ethical standards” who is direct about the threat and who “can muster a coalition to face it” — an issue, she said, that is “bigger than political affiliation.”
Immigration enforcement and fears of voter intimidation ran through other responses, with some readers expressing alarm about potential federal interference in the midterm elections. Katie, a 34-year-old arts professional in Denver, pointed to the killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration agents in Minnesota earlier this year. “Maga lost America when they murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” she said. “First and foremost I’m concerned about Trump’s immigration secret police, and I am voting for candidates who will defund and prosecute ICE.”
Julie Stielstra, a retired librarian in rural Kansas, said she would be working as a poll worker the following week. She said she is “apprehensive about the possible presence of ICE, which has been active in my state recently,” as well as “armed government agents or self-appointed ‘poll watchers’ who may be intimidating at best.” She said she trusts “my county clerk’s vigilance and honor” but worries that “federal minions and officials” could “disrupt or try to negate or overturn our ballots.”
For some readers, those concerns extended beyond intimidation at polling stations to the possibility that the Trump administration could challenge the election results. Richard Corcoran, a 63-year-old licensed clinical social worker in Lumberton, North Carolina, said he does “not have faith that the federal government under Trump and Republican control of Congress and the supreme court will respect the outcome of this election,” adding: “I expect problems in the aftermath.”
Michael Pitts-Campbell, a 78-year-old law enforcement retiree in Brookings, Oregon, said “my biggest concern is that if the results of the election are overwhelmingly Democratic, Trump will claim that the election results are false.” Whether, as he put it, “the appropriate member of the government attempts to not certify the vote or not seat the new representatives and senators,” he predicted the proclamation from Trump would “only widen the current political chasm.”
Even among voters hoping for a Democratic victory, there was little consensus, the Guardian reported, that the party would be prepared to deliver the changes they want, and several readers expressed concern that Democrats could fail to use a potential congressional majority to enact effective change. A 52-year-old insurance professional in New Lenox, Illinois, said their “biggest fear is that despite a likely massive Democrat wins,” Democrats “will not have the guts to do what is necessary to prosecute this administration” and pass laws “limiting the powers of the president, abolishing [the Department of Homeland Security] and establishing Medicare for all.”
D Turner, a California resident, said they are concerned about “the reflexive centrist impulses of current Democratic leadership and advisers,” which assume that “if they just get a majority, everything will be back to normal.” “There is so much hard work that needs to be done to preserve the rights of all,” Turner added.
Brad Southard, a 54-year-old teacher in Irvine, California, said Democratic leaders focus “too much on courting the illusive ‘undecided middle’ to the detriment of the needs of working-class people.” “I worry that the party will again choose to seize defeat from the jaws of victory by supporting pro-corporate neoliberal candidates and policies and refuse to pay attention to the real material pain felt by so many Americans,” Southard added.
For other respondents, disillusionment extended beyond either party’s leadership to the political system itself. Mark, a 68-year-old retiree in Parma, Ohio, said “both political parties share the blame,” arguing that “the GOP has morphed into something even worse than the [Democrats],” that neither party “offers policies that meet the needs of the people” and that both are “captured by moneyed interests.” “It just turns out the GOP has openly embraced the dark side while the [Democrats] are more coy about their corruption,” he said.