Hello!
I'm not sure if the question in the title makes an awful lot of sense in the way I phrased it so maybe an example will make it clearer.
Currently, around 75% of the votes the German AfD got in elections were votes people cast out of protest against Merkel's refugee policies. All the other ideas that party stands for were apparently irrelevant to those 75%.
Did something similar happen in the Weimar Republic? Like, did people vote the NSDAP because they were fed up with the economy crisis but didn't really subscribe to any other of the NSDAP's ideas?
I can't imagine it being a lot but then again I also can't imagine voting for them at all even out of protest so what do I know...
Relevant answers a few days ago here.
Yes, in a certain sense a vote for the NSDAP or the KPD were protest votes. Otto Friedrich has said that these two parties represented "the bitter nay-saying of a majority of the German population." There is one major twist, however, that weakens any comparison to the current day: these were votes against the existence of the Republic itself, with the NSDAP promising to replace it with Hitler and the KPD promising to replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Many Germans were still not comfortable with the Republic that had signed the Versailles Treaty, and from the very start there had been troublemakers blaming it for the Germans' numerous problems. Hindenburg, for instance, promulgating the "stab in the back" legend. (It's a stranger-than-fiction story that he was elected by the moderate parties in 1932 precisely in order to defend the Republic's existence.) Traditionally, the DNVP had captured the anti-Republican vote on the right, and its evolution shows that there had always been a radical-right constituency casting such votes: After 1926 when Count Kuno von Westarp decided to begin cooperating to get some legislative work done, his party began turning against him. When he tried to build a new moderate-conservative party with his colleague Treviranus, it failed to win significant electoral support. In other words, the DNVP's support came from those who believed firmly in non-cooperation with Republican institutions. Afterwards, Alfred Hugenberg took over the DNVP on a strong anti-Republican line, and joined the Nazi coalition (such as it was - nobody else joined it) in 1933.
In many ways, the NSDAP was more of the same, they just did an even better job capturing the anti-Republic vote; the KPD was anti-Republic with different motivations.
I am going off memory here since its fairly late where I am and thus my computer is off, but I believe the two elections either side of the stock market crash in 1929 highlight the massive growth the NSDAP had in voting. I think they went from 2% to 37% in consecutive elections which could be argued were a result of voter apathy at the existing structure. Similarly I believe membership numbers didn't grow as exponentially at that time suggesting voters that weren't fully committed to the cause nor were they necessarily believers in the whole cause. I will endeavour to find a more thorough answer tomorrow if no one else responds when I can get out my books and fire up my computer.