Kim Thomas, an electronics salesman in Winterset, Iowa, supported Donald Trump for president in 2024, as did more than two-thirds of voters in his rural farm county.
But Mr. Trump, he said, has gone off the rails, with such a pattern of unchecked power and vindictive behavior that Mr. Thomas, who has voted Republican for most of his life, now refers to the president as “King Trump” and no longer feels at home in the party.
In last week’s midterm election, he chose a Democrat, Sarah Trone Garriott, who won her campaign for the U.S. House.
On Sunday morning, over cookies and coffee, Mr. Thomas, 71, said he was pleased with the outcome. He liked Ms. Trone Garriott, he said, but also liked the brevity of her term.
“You’re not going to make a big mistake in two years,” he said, smiling.
Democrats had a blowout victory up and down the ballot last week, but the durability of their success is far less clear. Does their win signal a broad realignment in American politics, with voters moving in large numbers to the Democratic Party? Or is it a temporary turn away from Republicans based mostly on voters’ unhappiness with an unpopular president?
The runaway results had different drivers. There were Republicans who stayed home. There were Democrats who turned out in droves. And then there were people in the middle, many of whom feel politically homeless, who cast their ballots — this time — for Democrats.
Those last voters played a critical role in last week’s election, choosing Democratic candidates, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
In interviews, they said they had cast their votes to curb Mr. Trump’s appetite for power, end the war in Iran and ease the cost of living. But their support did not mean they had suddenly become Democrats. It was more a practical choice for candidates they felt better fit their politics.
“This is not a homecoming,” said Melissa Morales, a Kansan whose Latino group, Somos PAC, helped get out the vote in the meatpacking counties of Southwest Kansas. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic senator-elect, won Seward County, where she is from, with 55 percent of the vote, a stunning 52-point swing from Mr. Trump’s win in the county in 2024.
Voters said they yearned to move past the rancor and rage of the Trump era. Exhausted from extreme political division that many said Mr. Trump had helped create, they craved candidates who were open to working across the aisle, trying to unify Americans. What they wanted was a national vibe shift, one that they hoped would get Washington to focus more on their needs than on culture war distractions.
Yazmin Aldecoa-Durazo, 46, a taco shop owner in Tucson, Ariz., and a registered Republican, said she voted for all Democratic candidates last week. The rising price of beef has dealt a blow to her shop, Tacos Apson, which she has owned for years with her husband. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hurt, too, she said, because many of their products had come from Canada and still come from Mexico.
And while she initially supported Mr. Trump’s pledge to deport immigrant criminals, in practice the policy has gone way too far, she said. It has also dramatically reduced her customer base.
“We’re all being affected and they’re all adults and they should compromise,” she said of the political class. “It’s not about blue or red, it’s what is the best for the country.”
Jake Halusker, 42, a teacher at a Catholic school in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, wanted a Congress where lawmakers cooperated with one another.
“I’m tired of politicians pandering to their base,” he said.
Mr. Halusker described himself as center-right, but said this time, he voted for the Democrat, Brian Poindexter, to the U.S. House of Representatives because he was so fed up with the Republican Party.
“I can’t stand what the party has turned into,” he said.
In Iowa, Mr. Thomas said, he has been so disturbed by Republican politics that he changed his voter registration to independent. He said he wanted Democrats to tackle the national debt and try to get Republican support for a path to citizenship for immigrants.
He did not vote for Barack Obama, but said he still admired him for his ability to bring Americans together. With Mr. Trump, he said, “it’s always them and us, them and us. That’s not how you get anything done.”
Mr. Trump has been the biggest force in American politics for a decade, and many voters said he had changed what it meant to be Republican. If there is a realignment happening, they said, he is the reason.
“I went from a very proud and gleeful Republican to, am I even allowed to say that I’m a conservative anymore?” said Angela Brandenburg, 44, who works in education in Chesterfield Township, Mich.
Ms. Brandenburg has deep roots in the Republican Party. She even worked for the state party during college. But Mr. Trump poisoned the word “conservative,” she said, and she began voting third party for president starting in 2016. 2024 was the exception, she said, because she thought Mr. Trump was more likely than the Democrat, Kamala Harris, to keep the country out of wars — a bet she said had “failed miserably.”
“He’s been so awful and so mean that it’s spread to general vernacular that, ‘Oh, you’re a conservative? You must be a horrible person,’” she said.
Last week, she voted for Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. Ms. Brandenburg is dealing with health issues for her 5-year-old and liked how Mr. El-Sayed talked about health care.
“He has his platform, and he ran on it with educated responses,” she said, adding that she knew he couldn’t “go wave a wand.”
She said she had lost respect for Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, whose main campaign pitch she described as “Islamophobia.”
For Timothy Buttram, 33, a pediatric physician assistant in Charleston, S.C., and a registered Republican, “the mask came off” in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He said he had wanted to follow the evidence of voter fraud. But many Republicans, he said, did not.
“I realized the truth was no longer important to a lot of Republicans,” he said.
In 2024, Mr. Buttram, who had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, opted for a third-party candidate. Last week, he voted for Annie Andrews for senator, as well as for the Democratic nominees for governor and U.S. House.
He said he wanted Ms. Andrews, now the senator-elect, to hold Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to account, particularly on vaccine policy.
He said it was the Republican Party — not him — that should feel lost politically. And it needs to find its way back to conservatives like him before he reconsiders his support.
“They don’t own our votes, that’s for sure,” he said.
For some Republicans, choosing Democratic candidates was a way to send a signal to the Republican Party — beyond Mr. Trump. That was particularly true in Texas, where the G.O.P. has been a laboratory for conservative legislation, from education to abortion.
Hunter Patterson, a police dispatcher in Montgomery County, Texas, a suburb just north of Houston, described himself as an “libertarian independent” who usually votes Republican but no longer considers himself one after the party’s sharp turn to the right in recent years.
“I’ve grown extremely tired of culture wars,” he said. “Education has really taken a nosedive.”
He said he disagreed with James Talarico, the new Democratic senator-elect, on many things, but had voted for him because he could not bring himself to choose Republican candidates whose party had become “too toxic and too extreme.”
He hopes the Democrats can govern in the place where, he said, most Americans are — in the middle — and make practical pushes on basic issues like education and the economy.
That is a tall order. America’s political class is still deeply divided, despite the longings of people in the middle for bridge building. And Mr. Trump doesn’t seem done with division: He appointed Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policies, as chief of staff. And tacking to the middle could be tricky for the new Democrats, who will have to navigate the party’s left flank.
There has been talk of trying to impeach Mr. Trump, for example, an openly partisan fight that many moderate voters said they could do without. One such demand has already been formalized — against Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, albeit from a maverick Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, on his way out of office.
Will Republican defectors stick with Democrats? Mr. Patterson, the police dispatcher in Texas, said he’d consider it.
“If we can stop pointing out things that divide us and start embracing things that make us all in the same boat then, yeah, I just might,” he said.
For John Brown, a retired lawyer from outside Des Moines and a Republican, what happens next is less important than what happened in the election itself.
Even if the Democrats “become tax-and-spend liberals,” he said, his vote will not have been wasted.
“The president had almost more power than any prior president had grabbed, and the people spoke and stopped it,” he said. “That’s the huge event.”
Patrick Cooley, Ken Fountain, Ryan Patrick Hooper, Lourdes Medrano, Rylan Renteria and Tiffany Tan contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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