There are ten candidates on the St. Paul ballot. I’m going to break them into two groups: the people who might conceivably win the mayoral race and the people who are absolutely not going to win, so you don’t need to read about them unless you’re really just here for the snark, anyway.

On the ballot with at least some chance of winning:

Elizabeth Dickinson
Melvin Carter
Dai Thao
Tom Goldstein
Pat Harris

(Elizabeth Dickinson and Tom Goldstein don’t have a very high chance of winning, but if you were holding a mayoral candidate forum you’d probably invite them.)

On the ballot for some reason or other:

Trahern Crews
Barnabas Joshua Y’shua
Chris Holbrook
Sharon Anderson
Tim Holden who for some reason is on the ballot as Holden Holden

And because this is St. Paul, everyone gets six slots. You can rank more than half of these people, which, let’s face it, is more slots than most of us are going to have any use for. I said this over on the ranked-choice post and I’ll say it again: figure out who your first, second, and third choices are among Dai Thao, Pat Harris, and Melvin Carter. If there’s any of those three that you do not want to see as mayor, you will in fact want to make sure the other two are on your ballot.

I’m going to start by talking about the five non-leading candidates. I’ll come back to the five leading candidates tomorrow in a separate post.

Trahern Crews

I thought Trahern Crews had no website, because nothing turned up when I searched, but I found his personal Facebook page and that linked to a campaign Facebook page. Back in July, he ran an event (that no one RSVP’d for but possibly someone went to?) called the “Self Hate Awareness & Prevention Town Hall Forum” with a description that went as follows: “Join us as we discuss ways and methods to start loving ourselves…We will also address & propose gun violence in our community. join us for healing,poetry,food, music & fellowship.” I am sure he meant that we would address and prevent gun violence, but that’s quite a typo. That appears to have been his most recent event.

You can read more about him in this article. I appreciate that he’s door-knocking in areas where people might not even know there’s a mayoral race going on. I don’t think anyone needs to vote for him (unless you’re at the polls because he told you there was a mayoral race in which case by all means list him as your #1. Look into the other candidates for your other five choices, though.)

Barnabas Joshua Y’shua

Barnabas is a homeless man with a brain injury from a heart attack who believes he was called by God to run. You can read more about him here.

Chris Holbrook

Chris Holbrook is a Libertarian who ran for governor in 2014. His platform for mayor consists of, “taxes should be lower.” (Property taxes, specifically.) If you’re a Republican or Libertarian and find this guy appealing, then by all means put him first. You’ll want to decide which Democrat is your least worst option, though, because he’s definitely not going to win. (He suggests on his website that you try to get the DFLers to treat his votes as a plebiscite on lower property taxes and request that for each percent of the top-line vote that goes to Chris, they lower property taxes by $1 million. The first I heard about this was his website, though, so I’m going to say this idea doesn’t seem to have caught on.)

Sharon Anderson

All you really need to know about Sharon Anderson is that she fills out voter guide questionnaires with rants about lawsuits she lost decades ago, including fragments of e-mail sent (I think?) by her lawyer at the time which she appears to have typed in at some point because the other person’s name is misspelled. For the full experience you can go check out her website. Do not vote for her, even as a joke.

Tim Holden

Tim Holden believes in using a lot of capital letters on the front page of his website; I don’t know if he believes in punctuation. He has a cute dog. He blames Chris Coleman for losing West Publishing from St. Paul. I worked at West Publishing as my first job out of college. I graduated in 1995 and I drove to Eagan to get to work. Chris Coleman’s first elected office was City Council, starting in 1997. So, yeah. I also met Tim Holden when he ran four years ago and was not super impressed by him at the time.

I have no idea why he’s apparently going to be on the ballot as “Holden Holden.” I went and looked at his disclosure form (weirdly, St. Paul has only about 1/3 of those online. Minneapolis has all of them) and he appears to have correctly written his name down. I think this is a data entry error and he’s not invested enough in his campaign to have caught it. Oh, also, on his disclosure form you’re asked for endorsements, and he wrote, “All People With Common Sense” (and the quotes are his. He put quotes around it.) Under comments he wrote “SAVE THE CITY” (again with quotation marks).

Anyway, if you really want to vote for any of these people, other than Sharon (in my opinion, no one should vote for Sharon for anything, ever), by all means list them at the top of your ballot. Since we have six slots, you could vote for all five and still have a slot for a candidate who might actually win.