OMAHA — Becky Johnson remembers being so overwhelmed with emotion after seeing images of the women’s marches across the country on Jan. 21, 2017, that her husband thought something was wrong with her. “I walk out in the living room and my husband’s like, ‘What’s up?’” she said. “I must have had a weird look in my eye.”

She quickly drove to downtown Omaha, where she joined an estimated 12,000 other marchers. “It was powerful, and it was interesting, and it was fascinating,” she said, “to see that many people in Omaha unite about anything — besides some football game.”

But on an unseasonably cold afternoon recently, Ms. Johnson’s thoughts were on matters she found more pressing than national politics — namely extracting her toddler son from the indoor playground at a Chick-fil-A so she could get on with her day. Asked whether she planned to vote in the coming midterm elections, Ms. Johnson was ambivalent. She said she doubted that any candidate in either political party would make much of a difference in her life now.

“Stay-at-home moms in Nebraska who have a limited grocery budget to live off of — no politician can understand that,” she said. “Especially on a federal level. How could they?”