A GOP voter in Kansas put it bluntly: “The Republican Party has lost its way.”
From Texas to Maine, Democratic voters thronged to the polls Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time). Independents turned their backs on President Donald Trump. And Republicans seemed to be slipping out of the thrall of a President who has defined American politics for a decade.
In interviews and at the ballot box, voters declared they were unhappy with the way things were going in their country and wanted a change.
In 2024, Joshua Buchanan, 39, a train-design engineer in Woodruff, South Carolina, voted for Trump. Two years later, he had regrets.
“I probably made the wrong choice,” said Buchanan, who this time voted for Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate for Senate. Her victory over the Trump-endorsed Republican, Darline Graham, would have been unimaginable not that long ago.
Trump took the American political system by storm a decade ago, electrifying working-class voters with his hard-edge populist message. But as the back half of his second term draws near, his job approval has collapsed under the weight of unpopular economic policies and a war with Iran.
Democrats, who were dejected just two years ago, vibrated with fury – and determination to go to the polls. The actual candidates for Governor, Senate or the House could seem almost secondary.
“I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man,” said Ronan Donohoe, 85, a retired high school history teacher in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He said his vote Tuesday for Democrats was about “letting everybody know that we are fed up with everything the Trump administration stands for, and that we want better”.
In interviews, voters often expressed frustration with how much life costs. Prices are still considerably higher than before the pandemic, but voters said that Trump, who had promised to lower prices in 2024, now seemed to shrug off their concerns.
“He wouldn’t know what it is to pull into a petrol station and put petrol in your car,” said Suzanne Murray, 78, a retired hairdresser in Phoenix. “He wouldn’t know what it is to go into a grocery store and buy groceries on a limited income.”
She added: “He’s so reckless with the United States.”
Murray has leaned towards Democrats, but Republicans expressed exasperation with Trump, too. The reasons included affordability, the Epstein files and corruption. And a number of more traditional Republicans said in interviews that they no longer recognised their party.
“The Republican Party has lost its way,” said Van Z. Hampton, 71, a registered Republican in Dodge City, Kansas, who said he had voted straight ticket Democrat the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Hampton, a retired Kansas state judge, voted for Trump twice, but has become repelled by what he described as unbridled corruption.
“The ship was hijacked by thieves,” he said referring to the Trump Administration’s stewardship of the US government. “It’s going in the wrong direction – towards their shore to loot it and unload it.”
For Dan Bailey, a sanitation driver from Glen Cove, New York, it was Trump’s casual brush-off of the Epstein files, and Trump’s Cabinet, who included, he said, “a secretary of war who doesn’t know anything about war”.
“I am so fed up with being lied to,” said Bailey, who said he hasn’t voted for much of his adult life, but showed up and voted straight ticket Democrat on Tuesday. “I feel that there has to be some sort of change. I’m hoping my little bit can make a difference.”
Many Republicans and independents said they defected simply to stop a president they say no longer represents them.
Hampton, for example, had advice for Democrats who won Tuesday: They won votes “not because we love you, but because we need you to do the right thing. Be wise about support you got”.
Many voters expressed deep discomfort about where they fit in the political system. Many said they felt politically homeless. Trump has so defined the Republican Party that it was hard to predict what it would mean when he leaves office. And many voters also struggled to define the Democratic Party, beyond its opposition to Trump.
“There’s no Republicans or Democrats anymore,” said A.J. Asci, 49, who works in the hotel industry in Savannah, Georgia. “America looks more confusing than ever.”
Asci immigrated from Turkey and became a citizen 18 years ago. He said he had learned everything about life in America from his neighbour at the time, whom he still visits in a nursing home. But life in America today feels unstable: He does not think he will be able to afford to retire here.
And he thinks the money flooding into politics is gumming up the wheels of American democracy.
“You cannot get justice and uphold the laws if you get paid by somebody else,” he said. “It’s a crooked system.”
Many voters talked about their distress at the vitriol that has overtaken political discourse, and said they voted in part to counter it.
Sheldon McCormick, 68, a handyman standing outside his polling station in Waldo, Maine, said he would vote for anybody who stood up for civility.
“For me, decency can go a long way,” he said. “There’s good in the world, and it’s time to get back to it.”
A registered independent, McCormick said he split his ticket, voting for Susan Collins, the Republican senator, and Matt Dunlap, the Democratic candidate for Congress.
Lamont Fisher, 46, an independent voter in Austin, Texas, expressed similar distaste for the country’s angry politics.
“Why be so extreme that we can’t accept someone else’s viewpoints?” said Fisher, a broadband network tech who grew up in a Republican family. “We’re all in the same country at the end of the day.”
He said he had voted for James Talarico, who will be the first Democratic senator from Texas in decades.
“His view is, I want purple,” Fisher said. “That’s what I believe in too.”
Not everyone feels that way.
A number of GOP voters said they were perfectly happy with Trump, and voted the straight Republican ticket with a light heart.
“I don’t live with the guy,” said Ofelia Armendarez, a registrar clerk at an elementary school in Visalia, California, who voted for Trump three times. “If he’s doing the job correctly, that’s all that matters to me.”
One of their biggest concerns was a takeover by democratic socialists, which far eclipsed any frustration with Trump.
Patricia Fay, 69, a retired software engineer in Phoenix, said she does not typically vote a straight Republican ticket, but she did on Tuesday.
“I don’t want Arizona to become another New York or Southern California,” she said. Socialists, she said, want “everything for free”.
Still, others were excited about progressive candidates.
Jeff Fawaz, 42, who owns oil change and auto shops in Dearborn, Michigan, voted for Trump twice, because of his promises to stop wars and help small business owners. “I just believed him,” he said of Trump. Now, he thinks that “he’s the most bought and paid-for president I’ve ever seen”.
On Tuesday, he voted for the Democrat for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Sabrina Tavernise
Photographs by: Haiyun Jiang, Doug Mills and Lexi Parra
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES