New York City, United States – Ron Barba, 56, voted for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year. He also voted for United States President Donald Trump the year before. One is a democratic socialist. The other is a deep-red Republican.
Barba, a tall, outgoing man with bright eyes and a chin dotted with white stubble, knows the two politicians hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum. He does not care. “Both of them were awesome,” Barba said. Barba has become the face of a small but striking trend in New York City. Exit polling after last year’s mayoral race suggested that 9 percent of the city’s Trump voters in 2024 proceeded to back Mamdani.
Such swing voters could be critical in the upcoming midterm elections on November 3. Control over Congress is likely to be decided by a few key toss-up races. But experts caution against reading the Trump-Mamdani crossover as a new voting bloc. Rather, they say it’s part of a familiar trend of voters seeking relief among populists for their economic frustrations, as well as searching for a break from the political establishment. “A lot of times those people are reacting to economic performance, essentially,” said Brian Shaffner, a political science professor at Tufts University. “And a lot of the time, they are just voting against whoever’s in office or voting for the outsider candidate who they think will shake things up.” The feeling of being drawn to candidates on contrasting sides of the ideological spectrum is not new to Barba, a New York City resident of 30 years.
He explained that he’s a registered Republican who also loves Senator Bernie Sanders, an icon of the progressive left. “I always will,” Barba added. Mamdani was a dark-horse candidate at the start of 2025. One Emerson College poll found him pulling in only 1 percent support from New York City voters, placing him at the bottom of a crowded mayoral field.
But as Mamdani’s campaign gained steam, Barba felt energised. He recognised the same charisma he saw in Trump, who likewise began his presidential career as a longshot candidate. Barba also appreciated how the two politicians promised to tackle the cost of living. When Mamdani held a campaign rally with Senator Sanders last October, Barba said he “couldn’t get there faster”. “I was so excited to see because I’d never been to any Democratic [rally].
I only went to one Republican rally, which was right before the Trump election, and this was the first one for the Democrats,” he said. That decision turned out to be fateful. In the final weeks of the election, Barba went viral, having been spotted at Mamdani events wearing a bright red shirt emblazoned with the slogan “MAGA for Mamdani”, a play on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” acronym. He has since turned that notoriety into a business.
Barba said he has sold hundreds of “MAGA for Mamdani” shirts and hats, though more are shipped outside New York City than within. He believes the popularity of his merchandise suggests there are others like him are looking beyond what any single party offers. While the US political sphere is dominated by two major parties, an increasing number of US voters identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. The polling firm Gallup found that 2025 marked a record for the number of US adults who eschewed both parties.
Forty-five percent said they were independent, the highest rate since Gallup began collecting such data in 1988. That group dwarfed the self-identified Republicans and Democrats, each of whom hovered at 27 percent. But the nature of independent voters has long been a source of debate. A large proportion of self-identified independents vote consistently with one party or another.
Of the 45 percent of independents found in the Gallup poll, some 20 percent were Democrat-leaning, and another 15 percent were Republican-leaning. Only the remaining 10 percent did not tilt towards either party. Political scientists have argued the party-leaning independents often resemble partisans in their political views and vote along party lines. That is why political chameleons like Barba — who span the political spectrum, voting for dramatically different candidates — are a source of fascination at the highest levels of government.
When Mamdani met Trump in the Oval Office last November, the two politicians — who frequently exchange barbs — instead reflected on the overlap in their supporter base. “A lot of my voters actually voted for him,” Trump said, with a nod at Mamdani. “And I’m OK with that.” Mamdani, meanwhile, said voters in the Bronx and Queens told him they were drawn to Trump for “two major reasons”. “One was that they wanted an end to forever wars.
They wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding violations of human rights,” Mamdani said. “And they wanted to address the cost-of-living crisis.” Similar political crossovers have cropped up in past election cycles. If anything, those overlaps are “fairly standard”, according to Schaffner, the political scientist. His data shows that roughly 12 percent of Sanders supporters in the 2016 presidential election crossed party lines and voted for Trump that same year, after the left-wing senator failed to secure the Democratic Party nomination.
Trump, at the time, had never held elected office before. The 2016 race would be his first victory at the ballot box. Schaffner believes that outsider status makes a difference to voters. It allows them to “project their own views” onto candidates whose politics are not fully pinned down, he said.
In the case of the Mamdani-Trump overlap, surveys suggest their supporters also see themselves as less ideological. A CBS News exit poll found that New York City voters who cast their ballots for Mamdani but not Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2024 election, were less likely to identify as Democrat or liberal. The poll also indicated those voters skewed younger and were more likely to be Asian, Hispanic and Muslim, signalling a more diverse coalition. A similar pattern showed up further south, in the neighbouring state of New Jersey.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the 2025 governor’s race there in a landslide, in part due to Trump voters defecting to the political left. The same CBS News exit poll found that 18 percent of Latino Trump voters flipped to Sherrill, compared with just 5 percent of white Trump voters. A major factor for those crossover voters has traditionally been the economy. Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said affordability-themed campaigns were a common element among politicians like Mamdani and Trump, even if their platforms differed dramatically. “There was a subset of voters who thought that Trump was going to be the candidate who could deliver relief from affordability issues and also thought that Mamdani was the person that could do that,” Rasmussen said.
Going into November’s midterms, voters have once again ranked economy-related issues as their top concern. A poll from the research firm Ipsos released last month found that 48 percent of voters ranked cost of living as their “most important factor” this election cycle, higher than any other issue. That remained true among the subsets of voters who identified solely as Republican or Democrat, as well as the respondents who bucked party affiliation altogether. Whoever can speak most effectively to those toss-up voters may have an advantage in the midterms.
There are fewer competitive seats in this year’s midterm races than in previous election cycles, in part because of a mid-decade redistricting push under Trump. That redistricting effort resulted in about 10 states redrawing their congressional maps to favour one political party over the other. The midterms will determine whether Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress. But the margins are tight.
Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take back the Senate, and three for the House of Representatives. Fewer competitive seats means voters like Barba carry more weight. Experts say successful candidates will likely seek to speak to voters across the political spectrum — though, as the Mamdani-Trump demographic suggests, that does not necessarily mean offering a centrist platform. “In higher-turnout elections — general elections, presidential elections — it’s not possible to win with just your own side,” Rasmussen said.
“You have to reach across the divide and appeal to unaffiliated voters.”
