The midterm campaign is being fought in areas President Donald Trump carried in the last election, and largely among voters who have supported him in the past but have soured on his presidency.
Rick Sebring, a resident of rural Black Creek, Georgia, is one of them. He was among the Americans drawn to Trump when he emerged as a political outsider running for president in 2015, and supported him in each election since.
Now, he says, he jokes with his son and daughter, 25 and 18, that he needs a hat that reads: “I fell for it three times.”
Trump is “not the same guy he was before,” said Sebring, 66, who explained that he no longer believes the president is acting with ordinary Americans’ best interests at heart.
“It’s kind of like if your wife is screwing the guy next door,” Sebring said. “You know, you’re kind of butt hurt about it.”
He is furious about the war against Iran that Trump started after pledging to avoid new wars in the Middle East. Trump should tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the president endorsed for reelection last week, to “go to hell,” Sebring said, and “cut off all aid” to Israel and Ukraine.
He is bothered that Trump tried to stop the release of the Epstein files. He is disappointed that the government-slashing DOGE program, which Trump appointed Elon Musk to run, was ultimately brought to a halt.
Sebring, who responded to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll and agreed to a follow-up interview, is part of a small but potentially crucial slice of this year’s electorate. About 1 in 5 registered voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2024, 22 percent, now disapprove of the job he’s doing. They make up about 8 percent of the electorate.
They’re not natural Democratic voters — the vast majority identify as Republicans or independents — but this year, many of them, like Sebring, say they will cast a vote for the opposing party. Republicans have hoped to woo some of them back. If that fails, however, the election could become a Democratic rout, both partisan and nonpartisan analysts say.
The voters who have turned against Trump are a mix of longtime, once-loyal supporters and those who joined his coalition for the first time in 2024. They’re more divided than those who cast ballots for Kamala Harris about who should control the next Congress, according to the poll.
Nearly all of the people who voted for Harris in 2024, 99 percent, say they would like to see the next Congress controlled by Democrats “to act as a check on Trump,” the poll found.
Among voters who sided with Trump in 2024, a large majority do say they would prefer a Republican Congress “to support Trump’s agenda,” but about 1 in 7 say they favor Democratic control.
To date, Sebring has voted for one Democrat in his life — former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, who ran in 1998 on bringing the lottery to the state — but said “that is going to change in November,” when he plans to vote for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia).
Others say they’ll split their ticket or stay home.
Carrie Bacon, a 73-year-old retired nurse in Belfast, Maine, voted for Trump in the past because she didn’t want to see his Democratic challengers win the presidency. Now, she refers to him as “the bozo that’s currently in the White House,” saying he’s “after his own aggrandizement and making as much money on the side as he can.”
Bacon, who responded to a Washington Post-Schar School poll of her state, said she will vote for Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) because the longtime incumbent has shown she can act independently of her party. But she will not support the Republican running in her congressional district, former Maine governor Paul LePage.
Russell Clements, a 61-year-old retiree and three-time Trump voter from Gloucester, Virginia, who responded to a Post-Schar School poll in his state, said he soured on the president after watching how he handled the Iran war. Even so, Clements said that if he could go back to 2024, he would still not vote for the Democrat.
He isn’t sure that he’ll vote in this year’s midterm elections, and he suspects that if Democrats take back Congress, they’ll prioritize impeaching Trump over legislating.
“I don’t see where that serves any purpose,” Clements said. “He’s going to be gone in two years anyway.”
Jill Vandermolen, a 56-year-old teacher in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, who responded to the Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, said she voted for Trump three times as the lesser of two evils and because she had family members who were excited about his reputation as a businessman.
She, too, says she may not vote this year.
“Everything costs more money,” she said. As for Trump, she said that she does “not have faith in him at all.”
The poll found that 76 percent of Trump voters nationwide who still approve of the president’s performance either were certain to vote or have already done so. By contrast, among Trump voters who now disapprove of him, just 53 percent said they are either certain to vote or already have.
Historically, one of the strongest predictors of how a person will vote in midterm elections is their approval or disapproval of the president’s job performance. That’s because midterm elections typically act as a referendum on the party in the White House.
The challenge for Republicans is that Trump’s approval, which was already low earlier this year, has continued to drop as the midterm elections approach. His approval was 39 percent among registered voters in the Post poll in February, 37 percent in July and 33 percent in the current survey.
That decline, which has been seen in many other surveys as well, has largely come among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Nearly all Democrats already disapproved of him. Trump’s approval rating is significantly lower than it was during the midterm election of his first term, in 2018, when Democrats made sizable gains. His standing rivals the lows set by Presidents Harry S. Truman in 1946 and George W. Bush in 2006, whose parties suffered major defeats.
Not all Trump voters who have soured on him are going to punish Republicans in the midterms, however, seeing the Democrats as a worse option. Efforts to motivate those voters by highlighting issues on which they dislike Democrats have been at the core of Trump’s campaign rallies all month.
Amy Reese, 42, of Victoria, Virginia, said she has “never seen the economy this bad, ever, and it’s scary.” She has supported Trump in each election — and would again — but more recently has been horrified when she sees him on TV, “and he’s like, ‘Oh, the economy is so good.’”
Last month, her family’s electric bill was almost $700. The cost she’s paying each month for insulin as a Type 1 diabetic has more then doubled. Her husband drives for a living selling wholesale to convenience stores, and if Trump doesn’t do something quickly about gas prices, “he is going to put a lot of small-business owners out of business, my husband one of them,” she said.
Trump’s promised $5,000 checks if Republicans win the elections “aren’t enough” to make up for the hardship people have faced this year, and besides, Reese said, those checks would never get approved by Congress.
But Reese will vote Republican in the midterms, she says, explaining that she “will never vote for a Democrat,” primarily because she opposes abortion.
Dana Bessen, 76, of Highland, Michigan, also voted for Trump three times, despite not having a high opinion of him. The retired engineering technician disapproves of most everything the president has done during his second term, particularly his trade policy.
Bessen said, however, that he’ll still vote for Republicans in the midterms.
“They’re not Trump,” he said.
Post Polling Director Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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