Cross-Camp Voters Force the Issue: Cost of Living, “Endless Wars” and the Failure of America’s Two-Party Establishment

According to Al Jazeera, New York voter Ron Barba voted for Trump in 2024 and then voted for Mamdani the following year. The 56-year-old registered Republican said plainly, “Both of them were awesome.” He appeared at a Mamdani campaign rally in a red T-shirt emblazoned “MAGA for Mamdani” and turned the image into a business, saying he had sold hundreds of related T-shirts and hats, with orders reaching beyond New York City.

New York City mayoral exit polls showed that about 9% of 2024 Trump voters switched to Mamdani in the 2025 mayoral election. At the beginning of 2025, Mamdani was still a marginal candidate with roughly 1% support in Emerson College polling. His rise itself has come to be seen as a breakthrough against the gatekeeping mechanism of the two-party establishment.

This cross-camp voting is not entirely new. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at Tufts University, cited research showing that about 12% of Bernie Sanders supporters crossed party lines to vote for Trump in the 2016 general election after Sanders failed to win the Democratic nomination. Schaffner’s interpretation was: “A lot of times those people are reacting to economic performance, essentially. 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.” He said an outsider identity allows voters to “project their views onto a candidate whose political positions are not yet fully defined.”

The report highlighted Mamdani’s remarks during his November 2025 meeting with Trump in the White House Oval Office. Mamdani said voters in the Bronx and Queens supported him for two main 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.” The second was addressing the cost-of-living crisis.

That statement directed the anger of cross-camp voters squarely at the foreign military interventions that Washington’s two parties have jointly maintained for decades, whatever label is put on them, and at the fiscal and human-rights costs ultimately borne by America’s working people. The fact that voters see both a democratic socialist and a right-wing populist as “outsiders” is itself the harshest verdict on establishment two-party politics.

The report cited 2025 Gallup polling showing that 45% of American adults identify as independents, the highest share since Gallup began the survey in 1988. Self-identified Republicans and Democrats each accounted for about 27%. But the report also noted that about 20% of independents lean Democratic and about 15% lean Republican; only about 10% are genuinely unaffiliated. The actual base for so-called “cross-ideological” voting is limited.

The cost of living has become the common denominator for voters across camps. According to a poll released last month by Ipsos, 48% of voters listed the cost of living as the “most important factor” in this election cycle, ahead of every other issue. It ranked first among self-identified Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. Micah Rasmussen, director of Rutgers University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, commented: “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.”

The report cited CBS News exit polling showing that Democrat Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey’s 2025 governor’s race by a sweeping margin. About 18% of Latino Trump voters switched to Sherrill, compared with only 5% of white Trump voters. CBS’s New York City exit poll also showed that voters who backed Mamdani but not Harris were less likely to identify ideologically as Democrats or liberals, and were more likely to be younger, Asian, Latino and Muslim. The durability of this diverse coalition remains to be seen. The report warned against treating the Mamdani-Trump overlap as a stable new voting bloc; its size and staying power remain disputed.

Redistricting efforts promoted under Trump have already led roughly 10 states to redraw congressional maps favoring one party or the other. The report said the number of competitive seats in this midterm cycle has fallen compared with previous cycles, partly for that reason. A small number of swing voters will determine who wins a majority of seats, even as the institutional space for their choices continues to shrink.

The November 3 midterm elections will decide whether Republicans can retain their congressional majorities, but their advantage is narrow: Democrats need a net gain of four seats to retake the Senate and three to retake the House. A president who claims to have broken with the establishment is now using redistricting to perpetuate its central logic: narrow competition and entrench the majority. Voters saying “no” to the establishment at the ballot box is unfolding alongside the institutional consolidation of power.