The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm 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, Bucks County. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside his polling place. But now, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.”
Dunn lives in Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District, where Republican incumbent US Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick has been trying to distance himself from President Donald Trump’s policies in his tight race against Democrat Bob Harvie, a twice countywide elected commissioner who is a former social studies teacher.
Harvie, and other Democrats on the ballot, got Dunn’s vote. “It feels great, to put my word in,” he said, patting the “I Voted” sticker on his black hoodie.
Voters across Pennsylvania are getting their word in, too, as they determine which party controls the House and takes charge of the governor’s offices, state legislature and other leadership posts in the final two years of Republican Donald Trump’s presidency.
What many of them see is that the America they’ve known is slipping away.
They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.
In Associated Press interviews with people who cast ballots at drop boxes across the state, the angst was palpable, most sharply from those who oppose Trump but also from many who support him.
A vote is cast to stop the ‘madness’
“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a food importing and marketing company that has been hurt by tariffs, after dropping his mail ballot at Dauphin County’s election bureau in Harrisburg. Horner voted for Democrats, like former television news anchor Janelle Stelson, a Democrat who is trying to unseat six-term Republican incumbent US Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District.
Perry is one of 10 election deniers on the ballot in Pennsylvania this year, and facing what may be his most difficult reelection fight yet.
Last week, he was joined by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for a rally in Dauphin County, where he framed his race against Stelson as a battle of ‘good vs. evil.’
Perry’s campaign recently ran an attack ad that levied an unsubstantiated allegation of public nudity against Stelson.
Voters despair at the stoking of anger by Trump and allies
The anger in the air, stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights, is too much for some people.
“He’s just destroying us,” Democrat Linda Markle, 72, said of the president. She spoke outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County.
“I am so afraid for this country,” she said. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”
“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. … The division is horrible, absolutely horrible, and I can’t wait to see the back of him.”
Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, sympathizes with Markle’s sentiment, 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 he likes Trump’s effort to return manufacturing to the US along with the goals of his tariffs, and he voted Republican because he still thinks that party is more fiscally responsible than Democrats.
Then there are those prices. And that war
The Trump supporters interviewed by the AP at the polls signaled their tolerance of the surge of gas prices from the Iran war, in some cases blaming factors other than the actual cause. Nor did they break with him on the war itself.
Among them was David Stouffer, 59, branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, who spoke outside the Harrisburg elections office. “Iran has been killing Americans for 50 freaking years,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll suffer with some higher gas prices in the interim until they get that nonsense figured out.”
Does that put a crunch on your household budget, Stouffer was asked. “Of course it does.” How to cope with that? “I just keep driving.”
“He’s made the tax cuts real,” Stouffer said. “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”
By the dozens, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some of them granted the president his achievements on taxes and immigration.
Horner, the food importer, is going “bonkers” with the tariffs and all the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts while a “feckless” and now electorally endangered 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,” Horner said. He added, “He’s just playing out the clock on all of this stuff — where you just know he knows it’s wrong.
“And what do we have? Higher healthcare, higher food, higher gas, a business environment that is complete chaos.”
But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a suburb of Harrisburg, 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.”
Keystone senior newsletter editor Patrick Berkery contributed to this report.
