MAGA to Mamdani

One of the first viral hits of Zohran Mamdani’s early social media campaign was a reel shot just after the 2024 Presidential election in which he went to NYC neighbourhoods that had voted hard for Trump and spoke to people on the streets.

Exactly a year on, Mamdani returned this week to the same streets. “What we’re finding today is that there are far more people excited about the possibility of politics on the same street where last year very few were willing to have that conversation,” he narrates against overlay of last year’s disillusioned voters excitedly approaching him now.

In New York City’s industrial heartland in Brooklyn and Queens, where workshops and small factories produce the steel and concrete that prop up the Manhattan skyline, some workers we spoke to today are thinking about switching MAGA for Mamdani, although there wasn’t much sign of excitement about their choices in tomorrow’s mayoral election.

At a family-run factory in Queens, Mike laments the drop-off in business since Covid. Five years ago, he says, the business his dad built was still slammed. Now trucks sit idle in the yard, while the insurance costs to run them has increased 300% over that period. He doesn’t especially like Donald Trump, and he doesn’t believe he’ll deliver a lot of the stuff he claims, but he’ll be voting Republican tomorrow regardless. 34-year-old Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani doesn’t understand how the world works. “And Cuomo’s a snake.”

At a nearby steel factory around the corner in Brooklyn, Fernando Caban has turned against Cuomo too after previously voting for him as governor. Like Mamdani, the factory foreman lives in Queens and is likely to vote for him tomorrow. Caban’s children have been priced out of New York and moved to Florida and Texas, and with cost of living his key issue Mamdani’s affordability agenda has clearly cut through.

“The rent is too high right now, and the price of food,” he says as he shows me the factory floor. “It’s not easy to live here on $20 an hour. Taxes go up every year, and the bills for power, the gas, everything, every year go up and up and up.”

His colleague Rocky is even more pessimistic about the city’s trajectory. “I'm scared for the future,” he tells me. “I'm scared for the future of my children. What kind of future have they got in the city?”

Rocky is plaintive about the state of the country as a whole, and its widening divisions. “For me personally, it causes stress. It just makes your everyday living - life is just unenjoyable anymore.”

Despite being a registered Democratic, he likes what Trump is doing. “However, I just don't like his demeanor and how he goes about it. He’s too emotional about it.” 

Nor is he seduced by Mamdani’s socialist solutions, as he sees them. “Everything free for everybody, which I cannot see it working for no one. Because free only means that it’s going to be my family going to be taxed twice as much.”

Further down the road, however, some synthesis emerges.

We approach Michael when he’s taking a smoke break out the front of the bus yard where he’s a fleet operator. The 26 year old has only voted for Trump so far but now he’s swinging towards Mamdani for mayor, mainly because he represents something new.

“During Trump’s first term he wasn’t really in charge, in my opinion, because he had so many smart people around him. Now he’s in charge. He's making peace around the world but the thing is it's not very peaceful here right now.”

“I personally think they're kind of all hypocrites - when the government shut down they could all get together and sort it out right away.”

Michael’s not on board with all of Mamdani’s policies - he thinks free buses will just become “portable homeless shelters” - but he does want to find a way to build more affordable housing. “Everything is too expensive.”

Such are the contradictions and complexities of modern America. The MAGA to Mamdani pipeline is one that Zohran himself has identified, even as Trump muses about arresting Mamdani and shutting off federal funds while endorsing his erstwhile rival Andrew Cuomo.

“These New Yorkers were far from the caricature of Trump voters,” Mamdani reflected recently at a rally in Queens, Trump’s first home as well as his. “They told us they supported Donald Trump because they felt disconnected from a Democratic party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions. Trump, for all his many flaws, had promised them an agenda that would put more money in their pockets and lower the cost of living.”

Back in Manhattan, in the spirit of American entrepreneurship, comedian and actor Ron Barba is already trying to sling MAGA for Mamdani shirts (at $5 a pop they’re cheap but so is the fabric.) Barba was originally a Robert Kennedy voter who went for Trump primarily due to his disillusion with Joe Biden and his Covid policies. 

“I felt like the Democrats were totally fixing the media to destroy Trump,” he told me when we met in Central Park. “And Joe Biden was like a dead man standing, and the stuff he said was incoherent.”

As with everyone I spoke to, Barba is under no illusions about the scope of Trump’s promises. “Trump talks big stuff and delivers sometimes, and sometimes totally not. Man, Donnie's promising unbelievably big stuff,” he said. 

But Trump’s charisma appeals to him, and he sees the same qualities in Mamdani. “I think that they're very similar and they're just very magnetic, and with media too, both of them. They're talented people.”

“The number one similarity between both of them is that the opposite party has no answer for them. It's like no matter what they do, the other one is in a frenzy to take them down and the more you attack Mamdani, the bigger he gets, and Trump was the same way.”

Barba describes the looming collision between their two political forces as “the ultimate clash”, and perceives Trump’s threats to withhold federal resources as potentially just the opening round in negotiations between the two.

“It's the two great powers of different ideologies getting together and making this country great again. Making New York City great again.”

“Donald Trump lied,” Mamdani told that rally in Queens last week. “It was up to us to deliver for the working people he left behind.”

This piece was co-published with Crikey.