Over the past decade, Andrew Leyva shaded the space next to Donald Trump’s name each time it appeared on his ballot, trusting that a tough-talking businessman willing to challenge Washington would benefit working guys like him. Leyva, a 39-year-old who installs blinds in Arizona, voted to usher in the economic “golden age” that Trump so often promised. Leyva envisioned gas that cost $2 a gallon. Government spending would be cut. The influence of the wealthy and well-connected would be minimized. Regular people would finally get their say, and America would always come first.
It didn’t take long after Trump’s second win for Leyva to realize that he had been duped. First, he said, Trump seemed to obstruct the release of the Epstein files, which didn’t live up to the MAGA-sphere hype when some of them were finally made public. Then the president did something he had said he wasn’t going to do: start a war. Leyva now spends nearly twice as much on gas as he did last year—sometimes it costs him $300 a week. I ran into him outside a home-improvement store in Scottsdale, where voters will decide one of the nation’s competitive congressional races. I asked whether he was planning to vote. “Hell no. I don’t think it matters,” he told me as he loaded blinds into his gleaming Toyota pickup. Trump was supposed to be different, Leyva said, but it turns out that he’s just as bad as every other politician. Leyva doesn’t think that he’ll ever vote again.
I’d grown accustomed to this sort of response, given the many people who have told me over the past year about their deep distrust of America’s political system. They have no confidence in major parties or the voting process, and they believe that some sort of fix is already in. Their votes won’t make a difference, many told me, so why bother casting a ballot? For some, Trump was their last hope. They hadn’t typically voted, but they made an exception in his case. When he failed to live up to his promises, any expectation that voting could solve their problems evaporated.
The Trump era has brought with it a paradox: Even as Americans say that they find politics to be more toxic than ever, more of them are participating; the 2020 election had the most voters in history, and more than 158 million ballots were cast. Republican nonvoters have been galvanized by Trump, and voters who oppose him have engaged with politics for the first time. But one of the central questions of the midterms is whether Americans will continue this level of involvement. Those who, like Leyva, decide to sit out today’s election could help determine the balance of power in Congress. In close contests, the people who don’t show up matter as much as the people who do: Even small shifts in turnout can determine winners and losers, especially in tight races and swing states. Parties, candidates, and outside groups have spent months trying to motivate people to show up. It can be easier to persuade a reluctant voter to cast a ballot than it is to change the mind of a consistent one who is committed to a party. But in an election defined by anger over soaring gas and grocery prices, this could prove difficult—particularly for GOP campaigns seeking to motivate people who turned out for Trump and now regret showing up at all.
[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]
The grim mood has left Republicans battling to defend themselves, not just in swing seats but also in what was overwhelmingly friendly territory two years ago. Nonvoters and occasional voters are vital to the prospects of both parties. But all year, I have spoken with Americans who said that they no longer see the point. Some requested anonymity to talk candidly, saying they didn’t want employers or family members to read about their true feelings. One young Republican couple who were wrestling two fussy toddlers into their car seats told me that they cast their ballots for Trump in 2024, hoping he would make it easier for them to buy a home in Arizona. Now home prices are out of reach, and consistently high interest rates have made borrowing too expensive. They’re moving to El Paso, Texas, where the husband has accepted a job on the police force. They aren’t voting, because they’re too busy getting ready for the move.
The problem doesn’t afflict just Republicans. Some voters who cast ballots for Democrats in 2024 are also unwilling to make the effort again. A 40-year-old woman who supported Kamala Harris told me that she now doubts her place in the political process. The parties know that she took part in the previous election, and they’re banging on her door, seeking an encore. She doesn’t want to talk with them, because nothing they could say would persuade her to vote: “I look pretty young,” she said, “so I tell them my parents aren’t home.”
She and others I spoke with said that they’re so burned out by the constant controversies involving Trump and his administration that they’ve stopped paying attention. Some said they now go out of their way to avoid news coverage about the president. When they accidentally stumble on it, they’re unsure whom to believe and move on to more entertaining content to avoid growing anxious or overwhelmed. None of the people I talked with believed that the president, the federal government, or either political party were improving their lives. Many said that they trust only the officials they can see in their communities, such as city-council members and police.
A lack of confidence in the electoral system also helps explain the lack of motivation. Trump’s obsession with falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him has damaged faith that votes will be accurately tallied. Many people I talked with repeated his unproven claims about election equipment flipping votes and foreign conspiracies undermining the will of the American voter. One man told me he didn’t think voting was worth the hassle of tracking down documents that prove his citizenship—something Trump wants to make mandatory but that is not yet required to cast a ballot.
Making an effort is pointless when no one is listening and political promises are made to be broken, these voters said. “Our United States,” Leyva said, “has just been failing us.”
Ronald, who was heading into a Phoenix gym after work last month, doesn’t really identify with a political party. He’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He didn’t like Kamala Harris in 2024 but cast a ballot for her anyway.
Ronald, who didn’t want his full name used, because he doesn’t want his friends and family to know his true political feelings, is appalled by the ballooning national debt and worries that a financial crisis is on the horizon. He told me that he’s tired of candidates who seem consumed with tearing each other down at the expense of actual issues. He can’t escape campaign advertisements accusing candidates of protecting sexual predators.
As he was telling me this, Ronald formed his hand into a circle and held it up to his mouth, pretending it was a microphone. “This guy fucking loves pedophiles!” he yelled, mocking political ads playing nonstop across Arizona, where candidates for governor are accusing each another of being soft on child abuse.
Ronald used to vote regularly. But the ads and their “dramatization of politics” are a major reason he decided not to bother this year. “I’m so fed up,” he said. He wants to provide value to society through his personal life and is leaving making the right political call to the people who participate today. “I just want to be a good person,” he said, “and I’ll see you all next time.”
In the past decade, 41 percent of eligible voters participated in all three presidential elections, according to the Pew Research Center, and one-quarter didn’t vote in any of the contests. When compared with people who did participate, the people who didn’t were younger, had lower family incomes, and were less likely to be white or to have gone to college, the study found. In 2024, Trump aggressively targeted nonvoters, and it worked: Among people who hadn’t voted in the previous two presidential contests, he carried the group by 55 percent, compared with Harris’s 41 percent.
A major question looming over today’s vote is whether those people show up again—and if so, whether they will stick with Republicans. Lorna Romero Ferguson, a Republican political consultant in Arizona, told me that voter apathy reflects a fundamental unhappiness with the government and political leaders. “When you lose people who are either die-hard Democrats or die-hard Republicans that you typically could count on,” she said, “then it becomes a crapshoot on Election Day.” Between the conspiracies and the burn-it-to-the-ground style that have come to define today’s politics, both parties are making regular people feel uninspired. “It’s hard to really motivate an electorate that’s so upset and so turned off by politics,” Romero Ferguson said.
[Read: Trump has pushed some Texas Republicans too far]
Jamie Garcia, who recently moved to Phoenix from El Paso for a job as an X-ray tech, teared up when I asked why she doesn’t regularly vote. No one in her family ever talked about politics or voting, she told me, even though her dad, a Mexican immigrant, was able to become a citizen after President Ronald Reagan signed an act that gave undocumented people a path to citizenship. She voted for the first and only time in 2020, amid pandemic-era restrictions. She cast her ballot for Joe Biden, thinking he would improve the nation’s health-care system.
She hasn’t shown up again. The news stresses her out because she doesn’t know who is telling the truth or how to even begin to decipher fact from fiction. She has thought about asking friends for advice about how to start becoming politically engaged, but she’s afraid that people will judge her for not having paid attention. She haltingly asked me for help: “How can I be educated more, as far as governors and stuff like that, or just what’s going on in my city—even starting with that—without feeling so overwhelmed or so stressed?”
Both parties must now try to break through to voters like Garcia, the ones who have deliberately turned away.