(Center of the American Experiment) — 2025 will be an election year in Minneapolis, with the mayor and the entire city council on the ballot. Incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey appears ready to run for a third four-year term, but nothing has been made official.
Some names have been floated as possible challengers to the Mayor. The Minnesota Star Tribune has reported that current city council member Emily Koski is considering a run.
An eagle-eyed reporter at Southwest Voices noticed that DFL state Sen. Omar Fateh of Minneapolis has set up an ActBlue page to raise money for a potential mayoral run.
Fateh has represented District 62 in south Minneapolis in the state senate since 2020. He would not be on the ballot for re-election to the senate until 2026.
If Fateh does follow through with a mayoral campaign next year, presumably he would run to the left of Mayor Frey. Fateh’s 2022 senate re-election campaign was endorsed by the Twin Cities chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. (TCDSA).
Interestingly enough, the Star Tribune reports that some of Fateh’s Somali constituents have moved further to the right in the Presidential election held this month.
Sen. Fateh’s four-year career in politics, so far, has been…controversial. A sampling:
- Fateh’s ties to leading figures in the Feeding Our Future case made headlines in early 2022.
- Fateh’s brother-in-law was convicted in Federal court on perjury charges related to the “mishandling” of absentee ballots during Fateh’s 2020 campaign.
- In 2023, Fateh took to the senate floor to denounce his GOP colleagues as “terrorists” and “white supremacists.”
Back to the Feeding Our Future business, Fateh is but one of many Minneapolis politicians (including the Mayor himself, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and city councilman Jeremiah Ellison) whose relationship to the scandal remains unexplained. Several elections have come and gone since the scandal first broke and, to date, local media have accepted “no answer” as an answer.
At the city level, the use of ranked-choice voting (RCV) may play a role. There is no primary election for city office: all candidates from all parties compete in a single November contest. In 2021, 17 candidates were on the ballot for Mayor. In 2017, there were 18. No candidate for Minneapolis mayor has won a majority of the vote since 2009.
Without a primary or nominating process to winnow the field, it’s tough for both voters and the media to vet individual candidates. 17 voices competing for attention tend to drown one another out.
Stay tuned.
Bill Glahn
Bill Glahn is an Adjunct Policy Fellow with Center of the American Experiment.
