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Minority voters handed Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani huge victories. Is it a coincidence?

Zohran Mandami’s win against Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic primary has made waves through the political science community. The big uproar wasn’t only due to the exceptionality of a socialist Democrat beating a former governor backed by the party establishment, but also to the coalition that propelled Mamdani to a 12-point victory in the final round of the ranked-choice voting. 

Before the election, pundits agreed that the progressive candidate would be the strongest among White voters, while Andrew Cuomo was widely expected to blow the door off with minorities, especially Blacks and Latinos. But preliminary analysis of the election shows Mamdani doing way better than expectations with these groups, winning Latinos, triumphing with Asian voters and eating into Cuomo’s edge among Black voters.

The demographic makeup of Mamdani’s victory may be surprising considering the general assumption that minority voters tend to be more socially conservative than Whites, which would make a self-proclaimed socialist like Mamdani a less palatable pick. On top of that, Latinos and Asians registered momentous swings in favor of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election compared to four years ago, persuaded by his message on the cost of living and inflation and put off by a Democratic Party that reportedly appeared out of touch and could not address voters’ daily concerns. 

The Trump and Sanders Coalitions

Since Trump descended the renowned golden escalator 10 years ago, the MAGA movement’s primary target has been working-class voters opposed to liberal social policies on immigration or LGBTQ+ rights, but also supportive of more left-wing economic plans and are attuned to populist messages built on middle-class daily concerns like inflation or the cost of living.

So, I decided to take a look at the biggest progressive movement in recent years and its legacy after Trump’s ascent: Bernie Sanders’ 2016 attempt to the Democratic nomination. The trend I found is quite clear: many of the regions that backed the progressive Senator from Vermont have eventually registered a significant rightward shift in recent years.

New Hampshire

Starting from New Hampshire, the Granite State, which used to host the first-in-the-nation primary, handed Sanders a 22-point victory in 2016, launching the campaign of the independent Senator after he had suffered a narrow loss in Iowa against moderate opponent Hillary Clinton. As the former First Lady Clinton did best in high-income suburbs near the Massachusetts border and in urban areas, she was heavily defeated in rural communities, particularly among low-income and uneducated in the south-west of the state near the Vermont border. Importantly, those same townships registered some of the biggest rightward swings from 2020 to 2024. Even though Trump did make improvements in some high-income municipalities, he ran significantly ahead of his 2020 numbers in rural areas dominated by Sanders eight years ago.

Wisconsin and Michigan

Another one of the most favorable regions for Sanders was the Midwest, where he gathered significant support from white, blue collar voters as well as union members. He carried both Michigan and Wisconsin: two states that the eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton went on to lose in November, costing her the election. 

In Wisconsin, a state the progressive Democrat won by a comfortable 13.5-point margin, the correlation between Sanders margins of victory and 2020->2024 shift is quite interesting. Trump registered his biggest gains in 2024 in many counties that backed Sanders by consistent margins in 2016. This is visible in rural areas, particularly in the Driftless Area: a blue-collar region that used to heavily support Democrats out of their policies on labor rights and concern for the middle class, but which has been shifting hard to the right since 2016, backing Trump three times as well as other Republicans in different statewide and federal contests. 

In 2012, Barack Obama carried the region 10 points against a more traditional Republican in Mitt Romney, and four years later Sanders’ inroads with blue collars cost Clinton by a resounding 21-point margin. But by 2024, thanks to the appeal of the MAGA movement to working-class, white voters in the Rust Belt, Trump had flipped the region red, carrying it by 8% last fall.

In neighboring Michigan, Clinton ran significantly closer to Sanders thanks to her strong showing with minorities in Detroit and its suburbs, only losing to Sanders by 1.4%. Yet, the same voting dynamics can be detected. Once a solid blue state thanks to rock-solid Democratic support from the auto industry, Michigan has turned into a battleground state where votes for liberal nominees are concentrated into a handful of urban areas, while the GOP dominates the majority of rural counties. 

Those same rural and blue-collar voters overwhelmingly supported Sanders in the 2016 primary: Clinton barely won any county outside metropolitan areas. In 2012, when Obama carried the Wolverine State by 9.5%, the counties eventually won by Sanders in 2016 voted for the GOP nominee Mitt Romney by only 60k votes, a GOP lead that skyrocketed to 300k ballots in 2016 with Trump on top of the ticket. This highlights Democrats’ difficulties in being competitive in general elections in areas that still vote progressive in primaries which cannot be downplayed to a turnout problem. It is true that in these counties the party lost almost 150k votes from 2012 to 2016. But at the same time, Trump gained more than 100,000 raw votes compared to Mitt Romney, which makes clear how the father of the MAGA movement was capable of making significant inroads into voters that had backed Obama in 2012, a candidate that ran to the left of Clinton, only to switch to Trump in the following years. 

How Mamdani Performed in New York City

This may provide some helpful insights in order to answer a fundamental question about the NYC primary: did the same minority voters who shifted rightward in 2024 then vote for Mamdani in the democratic primary? Or were his gains with Latinos and Asians to ascribe to the fact that those more prone to vote conservative in general elections sat out the democratic primary? 

While it’s extremely hard to pinpoint this kind of voting behavior, the ability of Trump to tap into electorates open to back progressive causes when it comes to the economy – the central focus of Mamdani’s campaign built on the cost of living –  makes it is at least possible that a number of 2024 Trump voters may have actually backed Mamdani in the primary. It’s useful to bear in mind that the number of registered Republicans in NYC is far smaller than the votes cast for Trump in 2024. This makes it highly likely that the President received at least some support from registered Democrats, who could have in fact cast a ballot in the June primary.

For a better understanding of Trump’s showings in areas that back progressives, it’s interesting to analyze how he fared in House districts represented by most left-leaning Democrats. In order to do so, I compared the 2024 down-ballot lag to the DW-NOMINATE score of each lawmaker: an indicator that measures House members’ ideology and voting records. 

Mamdani vs. Trump

The chart shows Trump’s outperformance over down-ballot GOP candidates getting bigger in districts held by more progressive representatives, only to decrease as legislators’ ideology shifts right. In the districts held by the top 25% progressive Democrats, Trump ran ahead of Republican nominees by an average of 2.8%, but when looking at the top 25% conservative lawmakers, the President actually underperformed by an average of 2.9 points. 

When it comes to New York, this trend is even more pronounced. The average DM-NOMINATE score of NYC’s democratic representatives is -0.52, which translates into very progressive ideologies, – for reference, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s score is -0.48 – yet Trump managed to outperform fellow Republican candidates by a staggering average of 7.3 points. In the rest of the Empire State, the mean ideology score rises to 0.12, right in the middle of the political spectrum, and Trump’s average outperformance drops to just 0.73%.

Such important down-ballot lags cannot be ascribed only to turnout. It is clear that Trump was able to draw support from a number of longtime Democratic voters – in particular minorities – who kept voting blue in down-ticket races, even backing progressive candidates: ideologically so far apart from the President but whose economic message may present some similar traits compared to Trump’s, particularly when it comes to the focus on the cost of living. 

Considering the noteworthy electoral behavior of NYC in 2024, it’s certainly not impossible to think that a number of voters who switched from Biden to Trump untimely cast their vote for democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani last week. Interestingly enough, as the two major fight to make inroads into the middle class, it will probably be this prototype of voter – socially conservative, attuned to populist, progressive messaging on the economy – to decide next year’s midterms and even the possibility of a major future party realignment.

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