It’s only fitting: Check in with voters at Our Mother of Sorrows church in Louisville, Kentucky, to get a sense of the sour mood rippling across the country this Election Day.
Seventy-four-year-old Jim Brinley, casting his ballot for Republicans, thinks an over-reaching government is “ruining us” and wants to “get back to government as it should be.”
Democrat Keisha Matlock, a 38-year-old college student, wonders aloud, “Why do we even vote?” as she casts her ballot for Democrats.
Matlock sees “constant griping back and forth about who’s right. And, who’s going to do this. And, who’s going to do that in office. Sometimes, they say these things and they never do it when they get in there.”
Yet there is hope mixed in with the voices of anger and cynicism.
Listen to Danielle Glover, 28, who voted in Commerce City, an industrial suburb northeast of Denver. She hopes Democrats can hold off a Republican takeover of the Senate. But whatever the results, she says, “I would hope that once we get past the election, that elected officials from both parties can sit down and work on policies together.”
Listen to construction worker Rebecca Cziryak, who was out at dawn Tuesday to vote the Republican line in New Jersey, predicting it could mean more job sites in her future.
“Believe it or not, when the Republicans are in full force, I work more,” says Cziryak, who voted at a community college in Gloucester Township, near Camden.
Listen to Kristi Johnson, a pharmacist who voted at a community college in Raleigh, N.C., also hoping Republicans retake the Senate.
Republicans, she says, could “help us iron out” problems with the president’s health care law and other matters.
As for President Barack Obama, who’s not on the ballot but still very much on the minds of many voters, Johnson says: “I’m just waiting for him to be gone.”
Indeed, many of those casting ballots in Tuesday’s midterm elections already were starting to turn their thoughts to the presidential race in 2016.
Reginald Valentine Sr., in New York City, said he “really, really, really” would like to see the country elect a female president. That would be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
