INDIANOLA, Iowa – A tank of gas for Drew Brazie’s truck cost $35 more than it did toward the start of the year. Tariffs and rising prices kept scrambling the numbers for the construction projects he managed. A subcontractor said last week it would have to charge 23 percent more, because the price of steel was jumping — again.
It seemed to Brazie that President Donald Trump was doing exactly what he once railed against: starting wars, raising prices. And his party was going along with barely a peep.
The GOP congresswoman Brazie helped elect was distancing herself from Trump lately, but Brazie, a 39-year-old registered Republican, was unimpressed.
She’s trying to get reelected, he told his wife, Kayla.
“I see through that ploy to try to separate themselves,” Kayla said.
Voters in red and blue states alike are heading to the polls deeply frustrated, fed up with high prices and skeptical of a war that’s disrupted the global economy and dragged on far longer than the president predicted. Reliably conservative places like Iowa — and this area south of Des Moines — have become fierce battlegrounds as Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to record lows.
Democrats are dreaming of a blue wave that breaks GOP control of Washington, curbs Trump’s final years in office and delivers a resounding public condemnation of his second term. Republicans are trying to hold on to at least the Senate and minimize their losses, arguing to voters that however frustrated they may be, Democrats would make things worse.
In the Brazies’ town, in a county that went for Trump by 20 points two years ago, there were reasons for both sides to hope.
Some Trump voters were disillusioned. “He didn’t bring no change,” said Dottie Niebruegge, 68, who supported Trump through the 2024 election and is now voting a straight Democratic ticket. “He wasn’t the man he was before.”
But many others said they couldn’t fathom voting for a Democrat these days, even if they were unhappy with Trump. They were fearful — of socialism, a rising left flank in the Democratic Party and transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Almost everyone, it seemed, was voting against something more than they were voting for something. Anxiety was high.
“The whole socialist thing scares me to death,” said Kristi Dusenberry, 58, after emerging from Indianola’s polling site.
“It’s coming here, slowly, incrementally,” said retiree Albert Ostrander, walking out a few minutes later with the same concern.
On the other end of the political spectrum was longtime Democratic voter Terry Leih, a retired farmer in a Carhartt hat. He said his daughter moved to Canada because she and her husband, a legal immigrant from Venezuela, were so worried about the country’s changes under Trump.
Leih and his friends have bottles of champagne they’ll open when Trump leaves office — or dies.
“That guy is sick,” Leih said in disgust.
Brazie was never a fan of Trump and only voted for him in 2020. Still, he kept backing Republicans down the ballot, including GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
With Trump back in office, Miller-Meeks voted down efforts in Congress to rein in his war powers — until September, when she flipped.
“I will not vote to keep our soldiers in an open-ended war,” the congresswoman said.
It came too late for Brazie. As election day neared, he was almost certain: He would vote for her opponent, and the Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate, too.
“If she was comfortably ahead, she still would have voted along party lines,” he said of Miller-Meeks. “If she wins — she’ll just go back to doing it.”
‘It’s not America anymore’
Crouse Cafe had only been open 10 minutes, and it was still dark outside, but breakfast was already busy — and the Burgin brothers, sipping coffee at their usual booth, were already talking about politics.
They came from a family full of Republicans — with the exception of one sister they teased — and they were pro-police, pro-military and mostly pro-Trump. They liked what the president was doing at the southern border and thought he was keeping the country safe.
But lately they had some concerns.
Why did Trump have to put his name on everything? What was up with the White House press secretary who lasted five days? What happened to the $2,000 “dividends” Trump said he would send to Americans with money from his tariffs?
“He’s saying that we have billions and billions of dollars — where?” asked Chuck Burgin, 69. “And what are they using the money for?” Trump reupped the dividend idea at a midterm convention in September, this time promising $5,000 for “every adult citizen” if Republicans held control of Congress.
“That’s buying votes, and that’s not right,” said Craig Burgin, 72.
Both men drive pickup trucks that run on diesel. The U.S. war with Iran sent the price soaring to an average of more than $6 a gallon here in Iowa, up from about $3.50 a year ago. Trump and his officials initially said the war would be brief, but now eight months had passed, and it was still going.
“It starts out, ‘this is going to be a couple weeks,’” Chuck said, “and then it’s going to be less than a month, and it’s going to be less than two months …”
“Typical politician,” Craig said.
And yet, their qualms with Trump paled in comparison to the threats they saw from the left. Democrats, they thought, were going easy on criminals and spreading dangerous ideas about gender identity.
Then there were “the Muslims up north in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota,” Craig said. “I think that spreads like a cancer.” It wasn’t a fringe view in Indianola.
Immigration, Craig said, had changed America for the worse.
“It’s not America anymore,” he said.
There was no question — the Burgins were voting Republican. But they heard that Democrats had an unusually good shot in red strongholds this year.
“I pray to God Iowa never turns blue,” Craig said.
“I can’t believe Texas is even close,” he added. “That blows me away.”
Nerves and doubts
In Texas, some polls showed Democratic nominee James Talarico ahead of Republicans’ scandal-plagued candidate Ken Paxton — a remarkable position in a state Trump won by 14 points two years ago.
But Democrats there had gotten excited before, only to fall short. What if the polls were off?
“I’m hopeful, but I’ve also lived here a long time,” said Kristin Kistner Hall, a 58-year-old teacher, who said her fiancée, a two-time Trump voter, is also “seeing we need change.”
At a coffee shop in New Hampshire, 37-year-old Curtis Register wrestled with feelings of existential dread about the country. Nearby, a cafe window was still shattered after a September incident of vandalism when someone spray-painted a swastika and a white supremacist slogan on the facade.
Democrats, if anything, have been too timid, he said.
“If people are driving the bus off the cliff, I want you to stop the bus,” Register said.
In Michigan, another pivotal state for control of the Senate, some Democrats worried they were blowing their chances with intraparty drama. The losing candidate from the Democratic primary, Rep. Haley Stevens, had made a stunning last-minute endorsementof Republican nominee Mike Rogers, renewing divisions on the left and setting group chats alight.
Democratic leaders rallied around their nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, calling Stevens’s endorsement a total surprise and “despicable betrayal.”
But others in the party shared Stevens’s concerns about their standard-bearer.
Jacob Reich, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan, was disturbed early this year by El-Sayed’s comments, in response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue, that “hurt people hurt people.” (El-Sayed later apologized). Reich’s old roommate was a member of that synagogue.
“I would expect just a complete condemnation,” said Reich, who is also Jewish.
Other controversies over the candidate’s stance on Israel and antisemitism followed, making El-Sayed a lightning rod for the Democratic Party’s rifts. Reich threw himself into phone-banking for Democrats around the country. But he couldn’t support El-Sayed.
On Sunday, he joined a Zoom call with other Jewish Democrats, one of whom suggested a write-in vote for Senate. Someone asked, wouldn’t that be a waste?
“This is a symbolic act,” acknowledged Regina Hayut, a cantor at an Ann Arbor synagogue. “But symbols matter.”
‘SHAME ON YOU’
In the Cincinnati suburbs, Michael Pogue got to Izzy’s deli early and settled into a lawn chair nearby, waiting to confront his former English student.
The student, Vivek Ramaswamy, was now the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio — and Pogue, now retired from Princeton Junior High, was trying to catch him at a campaign stop.
“SHAME ON YOU, VIVEK!” read Pogue’s homemade sign. “I TAUGHT YOU BETTER!”
As a Democrat, Pogue was never a fan of Ramaswamy’s policies or his embrace of Trump. But what really angered Pogue — what made him drive 45 minutes out of his way on a Saturday morning — was Ramaswamy’s new campaign ad against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton.
The ad featured Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar — omitting the fact that the mother stayed togetherwith Acton’s stepfather after he was charged with raping Acton and she and her brother were removed from the home.
Democrats and Republicans alike condemned it as the ugliest salvo yet in an already-ugly election, a midterm year filled with personal attacks and false conspiracy theories. Pogue thought of other past students of his who were sexually abused; he’d testified in some of their cases in court.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican whom Pogue respected, urged Ramaswamy to take the ad the down. But Trump said the spot should stay up, and Ramamswamy said he would put millions behind it.
It made Pogue furious.
Pogue was accustomed to political disappointment in Ohio, a longtime battleground state that swung to the right under Trump. But Democrats were looking unusually competitive this year. Analysts declared the races for governor and Senate to be tossups.
And Pogue was seeing more Democratic signs than usual where he lived in Anderson Township, a long-conservative place he liked to call “the aorta of the elephant.” Democrats won local races there in 2025, not long after Trump took office.
Pogue saw a silver lining in the ad he hated so much.
“Fortunately for Amy,” he crowed, referring to the Democratic candidate, “Ramaswamy has aimed directly at his own foot.”
Outside the deli, people tried to block Pogue’s “SHAME” sign from view, holding a big red “VIVEK” sign in front of it. But Pogue kept repositioning, he recalled, and eventually the others gave up.
As the campaign event wrapped up, a reporter approached. By the time Pogue got free, Ramaswamy was gone.
Still, Pogue felt certain that the candidate saw him.
Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Joanna Slater contributed to this report. Hennessy-Fiske reported from Houston, and Slater reported from Manchester, New Hampshire.
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