Voters fear the America they've known is slipping away. On that, the left and right agree

The stakes in Tuesday’s elections are so high that Shane Dunn voted for the first time in his life, at age 65.

After a career as a cook up and down the East Coast, Dunn moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and voted last week in Levittown. “I was always a busy man,” he said. But now, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country and this is actually what brought me out.”

Democrats got his vote. “It feels great, to put my word in,” he said, patting his “I Voted” sticker.

Voters across the United States are getting their word in as they determine control of Congress, governors’ offices and more in the final two years of Republican Donald Trump’s presidency. What many see is that the America they’ve known is slipping away.

They see lawlessness from those who create laws, politicians stirring hate among neighbors, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with people casting advance ballots, the angst was palpable, most sharply from Trump’s opponents but also from many supporters.

“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a tariff-slammed food importing and marketing company. He voted Democratic in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, left the courthouse stewing about processed food, her son’s struggles to get veterans' benefits and what she sees as society’s leftward lurch.

“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.” She voted Republican.

The anger stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights is too much for some.

“He’s just destroying us,” Democrat Linda Markle, 72, said outside a library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “I am so afraid for this country.”

“All people do now is just hate each other,” she said, and Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that.”

Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, sympathizes to a point.

“A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” he said, noting that “I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.”

But Smith likes Trump’s manufacturing push and voted Republican because he considers the party more fiscally responsible.

In Ohio, independents Lori and David Wilkinson have voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in the past, and David recently praised Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in a letter.

Trump? “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?’”

Also voting there was Trump supporter Therese Mennell, who understands the distaste. “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,” the retiree said.

“But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”

Despite his unpopularity in polls, Trump repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he’s on the ballot, hoping to motivate otherwise reluctant voters. That cuts both ways.

Brothers Samontae Mwangi, 20, and Gathenya Mwangi, 19, voted for the first time in Topeka, Kansas, with their grandfather, Lynn Henderson, 68, a retired tire worker and former Marine.

Henderson’s mother died recently, and he wanted his grandsons to have an event to remember him by. All three hoped for Democratic victories.

“It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” Gathenya said.

Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager whose top issue is illegal immigration, saw the stakes differently.

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

In Nanuet, New York, independent Primrose D. Sullivan, a nurse who voted Democratic, singled out the billionaires allied with Trump.

“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.”

In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee, 63, described his conservative upbringing and past Republican votes before explaining his turn toward Democrats. He considers Trump’s 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 supporters interviewed by the AP signaled tolerance for surging gas prices from the Iran war.

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

“He’s made the tax cuts real,” he added. “He has secured the borders.”

Horner, the food importer, sees chaos as administration policies bounce between Trump and the courts while a “feckless” 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,” he said.

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

But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 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.”

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.; and Mikella Schuettler in Scottsdale, Ariz., contributed to this report.