Almost 1 in 10 voters who backed Zohran Mamdani in last month’s New York City mayoral election also cast their ballot for Donald Trump a year earlier, a surprising NBC News exit poll has revealed.
The mayor-elect, 34, campaigned on an affordability platform and pledged rent freezes, free bus travel and community-owned grocery stores and attracted a torrent of alarmist messaging from the president’s MAGA allies. That did not deter 9 percent of those who backed Trump over Kamala Harris to support him, however, NBC reports.
One such person was Brooklynite Adalberto Rodriguez, 30, who told the broadcaster that, after feeling sympathy for Trump during his Manhattan criminal trial, he felt compelled to back his return to the White House. He subsequently became excited by Mamdani’s campaign for City Hall.
“I pray for these two guys specifically,” Rodriguez said. “And that’s pretty much the first time in my life I’ve ever had such a level of excitement towards any politician.
“It’s funny, because a lot of people think that I’m joking or trolling or trying to stir the pot. I get that all the time. I know it’s going to sound silly, but it actually is the opposite.”
Another supporter of both men was Ron Barba, an actor and stock trader who went viral for sporting a “MAGA for Mamdani” T-shirt at campaign events, who said he had been a “reluctant” Trump voter only because he “could not stand” Harris.
“I was going to vote for Robert Kennedy [RFK Jr] because he was in the middle at the time,” Barba told NBC. “But then all of a sudden, he shifted over to the right and went to Trump,” he said.
“And so then I said, ‘Well, now I have no one that I really want, so I’m just going to vote for Trump again.’ And immediately, about three months in, I was like, ‘Here we go again with the fighting,” he added.
“So I was looking for someone new. I didn’t realize that I was, but I was looking for someone new. And when Zohran won in the primary mayoral election, I started to research him, and I fell in love with him… love an underdog.”
The duo’s first meeting in the Oval Office set social media ablaze when — despite publicly trading blows and Trump calling the former Queens assemblyman a “100% Communist Lunatic” and threatening to withdraw federal funding from his old hometown — they shared a remarkably cordial exchange.
While most had expected in advance that sparks would fly, as they did when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first visited the White House in February, Trump instead said: “I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor – the better he does, the happier I am.”
“I will say there’s no difference in party. There’s no difference in anything, and we’re going to be helping him to make everybody’s dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York,” he added.
He even laughed when Mamdani was asked whether he still considered Trump a “fascist” and interjected to tell him: “That’s OK. You can just say ‘yes.’ It’s easier. It’s easier than explaining. I don’t mind.”
Speaking to reporters afterwards, the president said: “A lot of my voters actually voted for him…One in 10. And I’m OK with that.”
His surprisingly friendly attitude towards the progressive, which shocked his MAGA allies, was spoofed on NBC’s Saturday Night Live last weekend, where a sleeping James Austin Johnson, playing Trump, could be seen muttering as he dozed: “Stop Mamdani, you can freeze my rent anytime.”
The mayor-elect has since revealed to NBC a key factor in their crossover appeal: affordability.
“I asked New Yorkers who they voted for and why, and the vast majority of the New Yorkers that I spoke to voted for the president. And when I asked them why, they came back to cost of living, cost of living, cost of living,” the mayor-elect told the broadcaster.
“And I told the president that one of my focuses had been, in the campaign was how to win these voters back, and chief among them was not just young men, but also Asian voters, immigrant voters.”
He added: “There were so many obituaries being written about the Democratic Party’s ability to engage with these voters or win them ever again. And when I asked these voters what it would take to come back, they told me it was a focus on an economic agenda.”
