Democrats and Republicans diverge despite shared unease
The Associated Press interviewed dozens of people who had cast ballots at advance polling places or drop boxes across the country, including Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, New York, South Carolina and Arizona. Democrats, Republicans and independents described different anxieties, but the AP found the unease most pronounced among Trump’s opponents and present among many of his supporters as well. Many said the America they knew was slipping away.
The election will determine which party controls the Senate and House and takes charge of governors’ offices, legislatures and state leadership posts during the final two years of Trump’s presidency. The AP wrote: “They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.” In a section on voters’ despair, the AP wrote: “The anger in the air, stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights, is too much for some people.”
First-time voters seek political change
Shane Dunn, 65, had worked as a cook up and down the East Coast before moving to the Philadelphia suburbs and voting last week in Levittown for the first time in his life. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside his polling place. He added: “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.” Dunn voted for Democrats and said, “It feels great, to put my word in,” while patting the “I Voted” sticker on his black hoodie.
In Topeka, Kansas, Samontae Mwangi, 20, and his brother Gathenya Mwangi, 19, cast their first ballots Tuesday at their election center. Both worked 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 former Marine lance corporal who wore a Marine’s cap.
Henderson said he took his grandsons to vote because his own mother had died recently and he wanted them to have an event to remember him when he was gone. All three hoped the election would produce Democratic victories and political change. Gathenya Mwangi said the economy and discontent with Trump could motivate people who had voted in the past as well as those who never had. “It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” he said.
Voters describe differing views on immigration enforcement
Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager and strong Trump supporter who is the daughter of Democrats, arrived at an election center in a van bearing a decorative license plate with an American eagle. She identified illegal immigration as 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.”
Joan, a retiree who voted with her husband, was more dismissive of Democrats. “I haven’t found very much that they want to change or work with. It’s just mostly, ‘I hate Trump.’” Both voted for Republican candidates.
In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee, 63, described his conservative upbringing, past votes for Republicans and his decision to vote for Democrats in contested races for governors and the House. Lee said he considered Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement lawless. “Nobody wants open borders, but you’re treating these people without due process, sending people to countries they don’t even belong to,” he said. “There’s no more rules.”
Trump’s absence from ballots leaves his influence central
Trump was not on the ballots, but the Associated Press reported that he faced “striking unpopularity in polls.” It said he repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he was on the midterm ballot, betting that the request would motivate fans to vote who otherwise might not. The AP said the strategy could cut both ways.
At a community center in Nanuet, New York, where some voters wore Halloween costumes, nurse Primrose D. Sullivan rejected Trump’s request that voters act as if he was running. Sullivan is an independent. “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.
Gas prices and tariffs strain households and businesses
The Associated Press reported that Trump supporters interviewed at the polls signaled tolerance of the surge in gasoline prices caused by the Iran war. Some blamed factors other than the actual cause, and the supporters did not break with Trump over the war itself.
David Stouffer, 59, a branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, 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.”
Asked whether the increase would strain his household budget, Stouffer said, “Of course it does.” When asked how he would cope, he said, “I just keep driving.” Stouffer also praised Trump, saying, “He’s made the tax cuts real,” and added, “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”
Across the interviews, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some credited Trump with achievements on taxes and immigration. Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a food importing and marketing company hurt by tariffs, dropped his mail ballot at Dauphin County’s election bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and voted for Democrats. “I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” he said.
Horner said he was going “bonkers” with the tariffs and the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts. He described the Republican Congress as “feckless,” electorally endangered and largely standing aside. Horner said tariffs and the administration’s other moves had forced repeated pricing adjustments. “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,” he 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.”
Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a Harrisburg suburb, wanted as much of Trump as he could get. He did not expect Trump to run for president again. Alas, “he can’t run again,” Casner noted. “Well, technically,” Casner said, “he can’t run again.”
Voters describe cultural concerns and political anger
In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, voted at Woodbury County’s historic Prairie-style courthouse. She raised concerns about chemicals in processed food, her son’s struggles to obtain veterans’ benefits and, perhaps most of all, what she saw as society’s leftward lurch. Things seemed broken to her, too. “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.” Marlett voted Republican.
Democrat Linda Markle, 72, spoke outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “He’s just destroying us,” she said of Trump. “I am so afraid for this country,” she added. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”
Markle also said, “All people do now is just hate each other,” and said Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that. … The division is horrible, absolutely horrible, and I can’t wait to see the back of him.”
Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, shared some of Markle’s frustration. “A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” Smith said, while adding, “I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.” Smith nevertheless liked Trump’s effort to return manufacturing to the United States and his tariff goals. He voted Republican because he still considered the party more fiscally responsible than the Democrats.
In Ohio, Lori Wilkinson, a retired home health worker from New Pittsburg, and her husband, David, a janitor, consider themselves independents. David had recently written to Republican Governor Mike DeWine to tell him he was doing a good job, and the couple had voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in past elections. “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said from the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’”
Lori said: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She feared that if Democrats won widely Tuesday, Trump would “go fricking berserk.”
Trump supporter Therese Mennell, a retiree at the Wayne County election center, acknowledged that some people disliked his manner. “There’s that kind of arrogant vibe about him that people don’t like, and sometimes I shut him off because of the way he talks,” she said. “But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”
Voters raise concerns about billionaires and political power
The Associated Press reported that 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,” Sullivan said, referring to the political and CEO classes, “we’re not going to have anything like what we had in the past.” Theirs was 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 cast a Senate ballot and described his evolution from a “full-throated young Republican” who voted for Trump as a young man in 2016 to a “lifetime Democrat.” Updegraft said Elon Musk’s throttling of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine disrupted a key defense against Russian attacks. He also cited a Republican Vivek Ramaswamy advertisement 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.
Updegraft said powerful men needed to be brought to heel. “That needs to be cut out from this country like a cancer,” he 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.”
Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.; Marc 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.