Panel members also divided over election fairness and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
Days before a national verdict on Donald Trump’s second presidency, nine voters across the United States and across the political spectrum split over the integrity of the midterm elections and divided along partisan lines over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while panel members on the left and right described rival candidates they consider extreme. The Guardian published highlights of the interviews on 31 October, three days before the 3 November vote, as part of its 2026 midterm voter panel, which asked participants about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the voting system, what they want Congress to tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense. The Guardian said it will return to the panel after final votes are cast.
The stakes are considerable. Millions of Americans will vote on 3 November to decide control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country — elections The Guardian noted could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.
The extremism question drew mirror-image answers. Sally Rasmussen, 62, an independent and progressive voter in Medford, Wisconsin, said the times have “created a certain extremism” and that her bias is to see it on the right, in Trump’s influence on candidates, the electorate and the people she lives among in Taylor County. She said she has never been a fan of Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, accusing him of showing extremism “from the very start” by seeking to undermine the 2020 election, voting for war and supporting tariffs, and never swerving from what she called the “lockstep Maga extremist playbook.”
Sharon Anderson, 70, of Etowah, Tennessee, who identifies as a Maga Republican, saw the extremism on the other side. “Most of the Democratic candidates are extreme,” she said, calling this political cycle the most extreme of her decades of voting. She said she has voted conservative Republican since she was 18, has never been involved in active politics and has never seen anything so extreme. She singled out Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York: “I never thought I would see someone that far left voted in.”
David Ferrari, 19, a Democrat in Tallahassee, Florida, said the answer depends on the definition. In his view, unusually many Democratic primary winners who refuse billionaire and foreign lobby money — he named Angie Nixon in Florida and El-Sayed — are labeled extreme despite policy positions on health care and “forever wars” that he said sit close to the average American’s views, a shift he noted some see as electorally threatening. The right, by contrast, has produced candidates showing what he called an “extreme” level of corruption and bigotry typically only seen coming from the White House these days, he said. He cited Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, whose main campaign strategy he described as a desperate bid to tie El-Sayed to “anything radical or Islamist,” and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign ad about his Ohio gubernatorial opponent Ferrari said implies she lied about her childhood sexual abuse.
On the voting system, Rasmussen split her confidence by level of government. She said she has “a great deal of faith in the town clerks and the county clerks” who oversee elections at the ground level and whose livelihoods and reputations are on the line, but “every expectation” that the extremists currently in power nationally, as she described them, will do whatever they can to cheat, break the law, violate constitutional rights and “try to deny election results, as happened after the 2020 election.”
Patti Fucci, 46, an independent moderate in Roswell, Georgia, said the election “will be free and fair as it’s conducted,” but described what she called multiple attempts in the past two weeks of intimidation by the Justice Department, citing California, Alaska and her home state of Georgia. She said those efforts rely on “the many tactics of intimidation and meddling and propaganda” to interfere in the elections. She called the number of people already voting early the election’s “biggest guardrail.”
Anderson said she is thankful for the Republican Party’s poll monitors and said that if there is cheating, or “one vote that is fraudulent,” that vote “should be thrown out because that’s not what this nation is based on.” She added that in some countries, people have died for fair elections, and that unless elections are fair, it is to the good of no one.
Morgan Akin, 85, a Democrat and poll worker in Redding, California, said elections “go on pretty well anywhere in the country” and that voters will see a fair election — though he said it could be, “unfortunately, maybe, delayed or not approved by the Trump administration.” He said Trump is saying he will not recognize the result in Alaska if the GOP loses there, and said Democrats have anticipated that possibility “all along” and have been putting together ways to challenge him in the courts.
Asked what Congress should tackle first, the panel pointed in different directions. Yajaira Martinez, 43, of Pharr, Texas, an independent who described herself as a disaffected Trump voter, said she hopes whichever party wins focuses on doing the right thing and brings ICE under control, saying that in the Rio Grande Valley the agency is profiling Hispanic people and “chasing them down, arresting and assaulting them.” Deportations must be carried out “the right way, the legal way,” she said.
Scott Akridge, 60, a Democrat in Marietta, Georgia, said the country should “Stop ICE by any means necessary” because, in his words, its conduct makes the United States look “run by a third world cartel” and its impact threatens innocent people’s lives daily. He said Obama “deported just as many illegal immigrants” while focusing on actual criminals and avoiding “unchecked violence against families,” adding that no civilians were “casually murdered” on Obama’s watch. He urged investigations and impeachment proceedings into what he called the blatant and rampant corruption the GOP has repeatedly ignored, and said that if he had his choice he would start with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Trump’s sons “to avoid the courts getting in the way with presidential privilege.” If Trump is pursued, Akridge said, Trump and Vance should be impeached simultaneously “since they are in it together.”
Ferrari said a Democratic Congress should reinstate and expand the Affordable Care Act, pass a war powers resolution ending engagement with Iran, impose a moratorium on AI data centers, end military aid to Israel, reverse the White House’s cancellation of federally approved funding, undo the blanket tariffs, release the Epstein files and scrutinize and impeach the president and his cabinet. He added that he hopes Democrats also fight to advance Medicare for All, a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage and robust federal job and housing programs.
Akin wanted Congress to start with gas prices, food prices, medical costs and interest rates — “all of the things that are hurting the economy right now” — and said it is not time to talk about impeachment, which he said would cause more problems than necessary.
Justin Daniels, 45, a Democrat in Detroit, said the priority is to “bring civility back to society,” describing a “race to the bottom” in which Democrats, when they held power before, spent so much time arguing amongst themselves. He predicted that a Democratic win would slow, but not stop, what he called society’s collapse.
Caleb Davis, 22, a Republican in Greenville, South Carolina, said he hopes a Republican win next week delivers “a swift and decisive victory in Iran,” adding that his party seems “allergic to winning” in individual races, the national agenda and geopolitics, and needs “to grow a spine.”
The panel divided most sharply over Hegseth. Ferrari called him “unfit for the job in almost every possible way,” saying the secretary, whom he described as having a “vitriolic attitude toward women and every minority,” was “an incompetent buffoon chosen purely for his loyalty to the president over any real consideration of his capabilities.” He said the livestreamed execution idea is one of a series of moves “designed to propel America back into some of the darkest chapters of our history,” and cited the verdict of Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times on the idea: “That’s a lynching.”
Anderson backed the idea. She said the country needs a strong leader in every position and likened the choice to a house fire: rather than follow someone who wants to sit and discuss what to do, “I want somebody to get me by the hair of the head and say: ‘Let’s get the hell out of the house.’ I think that’s Hegseth.” “I was all for the livestreamed execution,” said Anderson, a mother of five who added that mothers look at things differently. “When I first heard it I said: ‘Yeah, I’m going to watch it.’” She responded to concerns about protecting children from such a broadcast by pointing to how many children watched Charlie Kirk’s killing, and said that “if someone commits a crime, they should suffer the consequences.”
Davis called Hegseth “a force to be reckoned with.” He said he appreciated Hegseth’s “restoration of military culture away from the effeminate mockery of itself that it was under Levine” — Admiral Rachel Levine, who is transgender and led the public health corps during the Joe Biden administration, as the Guardian noted — and welcomed the war department’s return to what he called its original, unashamed title. He said the country had been sitting “while everyone else pretends not to play the game” for too long, and said Hegseth had “called the world’s bluff.” He argued the public execution of the man he called a traitor who killed several American soldiers “should have been done a long time ago.” “America is a joke if it can’t execute justice,” he said.
Akin, who said he spent 15 years in the Marine Corps, offered the harshest assessment. He called Hegseth “the most inadequate person that has ever been in that position” and said Hegseth has come up with the most ridiculous things he has ever seen. He said Hegseth is prejudiced, in Akin’s account, against women and minorities in the military — “as prejudiced as Trump is about certain things” — and said Hegseth has gotten rid of many of the top generals, most of them women, Black people or Latinos. He said Hegseth has “really downgraded the military” and has “no idea what he’s doing” on operations such as the one in Iran. He called the livestream idea “very poor judgment,” noting, “we’ve never done that in our history,” and said it would be another black mark on his ability to carry out his job.