Monthly Archives: September 2025

Election 2025: Minneapolis Mayoral Race (the randos)

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There are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor this cycle, and that’s enough that I’m going to break up my posts into two. This post will not cover DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh, Jazz Hampton, or Jacob Frey; you can find them in a separate post. This is basically to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about all the fringe candidates. I think you should use your three picks on some order of Davis, Fateh, and Hampton, but I am not the boss of you and if you like two of those three and hate the other I would rather see you use up your third slot on a rando than rank Frey.

The also-rans on the mayoral ballot, along with their “political party or principle” (you can write down up to three words, but if you’re too close to an actual party they may make you pick again):

Kevin Dwire (Socialist Workers Party)
Charlie McCloud (Independent)
Xavier Pauke (Protecting Tomorrow’s Dreams)
Troy A. Peterson (Momunist)
Andrea Revel (For the People)
Alejandro Richardson (Independent)
Brenda Short (DFL)
Adam Terzich (Renaissance)
Laverne Turner (Independent)
Jeffrey Alan Wagner (Why Not Wagner)
Kevin Ward (Nobody’s Party)

tl;dr: don’t vote for any of these people.

I will go through them in order. Note: many of these candidates did show up at this massive forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters, and you can watch it. FYI, you can skip forward 5 seconds at a time by hitting the right-arrow key, which is handy if there are people you’re not interested in hearing from.

Kevin Dwire (Socialist Workers Party)

Like all Socialist Workers Party candidates, Kevin Dwire doesn’t have his own website and instead links to “The Militant,” where you can go over and read their claim that the Gaza genocide is a “slander” promoted by the “liberal bourgeois media.” The Militant also has a July article about Dwire specifically. Asked about homelessness, he apparently said that “the crisis is a product of the workings of capitalism. What’s needed, he explained, is for workers and our unions to break with the Democrats and Republicans and build a party of our own capable of leading the fight to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers.” He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.

Charlie McCloud (Independent)

Charlie McCloud listed charliemccloud.com as her website, but there is no site there. There are some Charlie McClouds on Facebook and LinkedIn but none that appeared to be from Minnesota. I sincerely do not know why people pay $500 to appear on the ballot when they cannot be bothered to so much as make a Facebook page saying “haha made you look!” She did come to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch her opening statement here. Given her strong British accent I was a little surprised to hear her say that Minneapolis has always been home and that she was born in Illinois.

Xavier Pauke (Protecting Tomorrow’s Dreams)

Xavier Pauke is a security guard. He did a Reddit AMA where among other things he makes it clear he lacks background knowledge on some fundamental city workings like the existence of the Board of Estimate and Taxation. (Lots of people don’t know what the BET does, but if you’re running for mayor, you need to know what the BET does.) Because he started with a Reddit AMA and used his existing Reddit account, people checked his post history and discovered him humblebragging about his dick size. (That’s a link to a Bluesky post with a screen shot; I think he might have belatedly removed the Reddit post.)

Like a lot of people who run for office with a vague idea that they want to make a difference but a lack of specific knowledge of what the office they’re running for actually does, what Xavier probably ought to do is look for a Citizen Board for the city that he could join and do work on.

He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.

Troy A. Peterson (Momunist)

Troy Peterson’s website is frankly incoherent but makes it clear he hates Affirmative Action and wants people punished for a long list of things. Some of his resentments are directed towards the GOP but based on his Twitter I would describe his political orientation as a conspiracy-minded right-winger. He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here. He’s possibly even more unhinged in person as on his website and Twitter.

Andrea Revel (For the People)

Andrea has a campaign website where she tells you that “her extensive experience and unwavering dedication make her the ideal candidate for mayor” but offers zero information about her extensive experience. I also could not find a LinkedIn. I found her campaign Instagram, which also tells you nothing about her experience (or anything, really, the videos I watched were pretty content-free). Her Facebook page has an image of a campaign flyer saying “Serving the people and preserving our values” but she doesn’t say what her values are. I get right-wing vibes from the fact that she shared something from Alpha News on her Facebook but the main reason I don’t think anyone should vote for her is that she tells you she has “extensive experience” that she describes literally nowhere in any form.

At the LWV mayoral forum she made it clear she’s an ICE supporter, so I think my right-wing vibes here were correct. You can watch her opening statement here.

Alejandro Richardson (Independent)

I maybe found a long-abandoned LinkedIn for him but nothing else. (There are lots of Alejandro Richardsons on Facebook but they don’t seem to be local.) He did show up for the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here if you want. His primary qualification is that he’s never lived anywhere else (literally he says this).

Brenda Short (DFL)

Brenda Short is probably the closest person to a real candidate running an actual campaign in this post. Probably the best moment of her campaign came at the DFL City Convention, where during the mayoral candidate Q&A someone asked a question about the fact that the officer who shot Amir Locke got a job training other officer in use of force. You can see the question and responses starting here. The first person to answer was Jacob Frey, who gave a BS answer and got booed. Brenda spoke last and delivered a fiery response about how she’d respond if someone who’d killed one of her children was given a promotion at her job, and challenged Jacob to consider how he’d feel if it was his kid. She attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch her opening statement here.

Back in January, Brenda fired her campaign manager via a newspaper interview. In the interview she says (after describing his mistake) “I cried about it yesterday, got up (today) and wrote his termination letter this morning and I hadn’t had time to talk to him. I was going to talk to him later on today. So I guess he’ll read it in the newspaper.” Except she did not talk to him later that day, or the next day. He continued coming to work as normal for two weeks after she gave that interview, finally hearing about it via Taylor Dahlin, who Tweeted about the article. She then filed an administrative complaint against the DSA, Omar Fateh, and Jake Ameca Luna (the fired campaign manager) claiming that he’d been sent to sabotage her campaign; the complaint was tossed in February. In March, at some mayoral forum, she went off on Jake again and claimed that he’d tried to sabotage her.

This is, in fact, a great example of being your own worst enemy. No one is going to waste resources on sabotaging Brenda.

Anyway, she has no endorsements that I could find (a page pops up if you search but it’s got placeholder stock photos, not actual endorsements) and no events.

Adam Terzich (Renaissance)

Adam Terzich works in health care IT, has no campaign website, and did not come to the LWV forum. And yet, he spent $500 to file for the office. There are so many ways I can think of that would be more enjoyable to spend $500! For example, someone could buy a dozen copies of Ada Palmer’s book Inventing the Renaissance (which I bet Adam Terzich should read) and form a book club to read it and discuss it. You could spend the leftover money on refreshments for your discussion.

Laverne Turner (Independent)

Laverne Turner is a Republican. Last time he said that up front. He described himself as an Independent this time but he’s still using Winred to process his donations. (Winred is like if ActBlue were both Republican, and several orders of magnitude more corrupt.) Last time around he wanted rent control (unusual for a Republican.) This time around he’s pretty much exclusively a law-and-order candidate. Like his website highlights three issues, in theory, but then the only one he talks about is public safety.

He came to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.

Jeffrey Alan Wagner (Why Not Wagner)

Jeffrey is the guy who ran the campaign back in 2013 where he climbed out of a lake and then screamed “WAKE UP MINNEAPOLIS.” His campaign link is to a YouTube channel where you can watch his new video. Apparently his major concerns are suburbanites dropping dildos in our lakes, and weirdos hassling people at bus stops. (I am not sure if he’s one of the weirdos in question.) He did not come to the LWV mayoral forum.

Kevin Ward (Nobody’s Party)

Kevin ran four years ago and has not gotten any less incoherent since then. He’s anti-MAGA and anti-ICE; I have no idea whether he has any positions on local issues because his campaign site is his Facebook, and his posts are all really long and rambling. (I feel like this one is a good sample, although it’s actually significantly more coherent than a lot of what he posts.)

Kevin went to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here. He starts speaking without a microphone but someone hands it to him a few words in.

There is not a single candidate here that makes me think, “oh, if only this person were viable!” None of these people have any chance of winning, and also, none of them bring rudimentary qualifications or knowledge or demonstrate any capacity for doing the work.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 4

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On the ballot:

LaTrisha Vetaw (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Leslie Davis (“Tell The Truth” — which I put in scare-quotes for a reason)
Marvina Haynes (DFL)

Leslie Davis

Leslie Davis is an anti-vax anti-mask COVID-denying weirdo. For his “political party or principle” he put “Tell the Truth” which is ironic given that he’s repeating a lot of absolute bullshit. Don’t vote for him.

LaTrisha Vetaw

I got asked a while back if I regret any of my endorsements and LaTrisha probably tops the list — when she ran for Park Board At Large in 2017 as a Green who had served as Board Chair for Our Streets, I thought she sounded pretty cool. She’s turned into one of the most conservative City Council reps in Minneapolis. Like Michael Rainville in Ward 3, she not only voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of the Labor Standards Board, she voted against creating it in the first place. She both voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of the Affordable Housing right of first refusal ordinance and voted against it in the first place. She voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of a minimum wage for rideshare drivers and also voted against it in the first place.

She’s also, in my opinion, kind of an asshole. There was a Public Health & Safety Committee meeting in January of 2024 where she fully melted down. The whole altercation starts here, if you want the full context. At the point I linked to (2 hours 14 minutes into the meeting), LaTrisha starts speaking and spends five minutes making a speech (important note: she’s not actually on this committee.) At 2:19 Jason Chavez breaks in to ask if she has a question for the city staff, and to ask her not to assign motives to other City Council members, and this sets her off, she yells at Jason, insults him, and shouts him down repeatedly. You can also read Daniel Suitor’s transcript of this, but I recommend watching the video.

The official City of Minneapolis video stops when the meeting is adjourned. Post-meeting, LaTrisha got into an argument with an activist (Nicole Mason, who at one point LaTrisha actually put her hands on.) She yelled at the meeting at large that she didn’t want any of the white people there to talk to her, yelled some more at the activist, and when that activist left the room, she walked around the room picking out other activists to yell at individually. You can see the video of all that here, or if Instagram links don’t work for you some of it’s here. I would strongly encourage people to watch the video because there’s a visceral difference between reading “she went and yelled at people” and watching her roaming around the room picking out activists to berate.

Also, the context of her speech and meltdown was that she was trying to disrupt questioning of Toddrick Barnette and Margaret Anderson Kelliher by Council Members after they admitted that the city gave zero notice before clearing an encampment, and then lied about shelter availability to the press after. When LaTrisha is in the midst of her “you poor beleaguered city staff, working so hard with so little appreciation” bit, you should know that she was speaking to two high ranking, well paid, mayorally appointed people who had disregarded city policies.

Also, I spent some time looking through Josh Martin’s Divided Vote Tracker, a spreadsheet that tells you how each Council Member voted on the non-unanimous votes taken, with links to the thing that was passed and to the video record of the debate in the City Council meeting. Among the things LaTrisha voted against was an interim use permit for a recuperative care facility for homeless people recovering from illnesses or medical procedures. (I watched the debate on that and she didn’t speak against it — Linnea Palmisano did — just voted against it at the end.)

At a different City Council meeting, she used the phrase “say their names” while making an emotional speech about a group of police horses when funding for the mounted patrol was cut. (Link is, again, to the whole speech about the horses.) (There are arguments in favor of mounted cops but St. Paul got rid of theirs in 2019 and most cities have concluded it’s not actually worth the money and hassle of keeping horses in 2025.) And of course there was her whole “I’m going to be your Council Rep” schtick to a bunch of landlords back in 2021.

Marvina Haynes

Marvina Haynes is running a significantly more serious campaign this time than she did in 2023. She has endorsements and she’s door-knocking with Omar Fateh. She runs a nonprofit working to exonerate the falsely convicted, and succeeded in having her brother Marvin freed in late 2023. (Marvin spent almost 20 years in prison for a crime he absolutely did not commit.) Also, and importantly, she isn’t LaTrisha Vetaw OR an anti-vax crank.

I would vote for Marvina Haynes if I lived in Ward 4.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 3

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It’s a rematch of the same people as 2023:

Marcus Mills (Progressive Unity Independent)
Michael Rainville (DFL, Incumbent)

You can read what I said about these two people two years ago, if you want. In the last two years, Michael Rainville not only voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of the Labor Standards Board, he voted against creating it in the first place. He not only voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of the Affordable Housing right of first refusal ordinance, he voted against it in the first place. He voted to uphold Mayor Frey’s veto of a minimum wage for rideshare drivers and also voted against it in the first place.

Rainville is one of the most reliable conservatives on the City Council and I don’t like him at all.

Marcus Mills is a renter and small business owner (I am genuinely unclear on what his business does: his LinkedIn references both massage therapy and communications consulting under the “At Your Fingertips” business name). His civic and policy experience includes several local boards (membership on the Minneapolis Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission and the Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership’s Energy Vision Advisory Committee; he was also Chair of the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association Land Use and Development Committee and Chair of the Senate District 60 DFL.) He’s endorsed by former City Council rep Cam Gordon and former mayor candidate Sheila Nezhad. I would totally vote for Marcus Mills in Ward 3.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 2

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One of the problems I have been running into is an increasing sense of perfectionism towards my posts, where I feel like I need to do a deep dive not only into the candidates but into every accomplishment they list. I’m going to just go ahead and write this up and post it despite the fact that I feel like I have slightly incomplete information. I got a Moderna COVID shot today and tomorrow the odds that I will feel like working on a blog post are 50% at best.

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Michael Baskins (DFL)
Shelley Madore (DFL)
Max Theroux (DFL)
Robin Wonsley (DSA, incumbent)

So before I get into this race I’m going to talk briefly about all the PACs because they have similar names and it’s frankly pretty confusing.

  • There was We Love Minneapolis. Presumably called that because so many of them love Minneapolis, but don’t live there. (Obligatory note: neither do I, but at least I live in St. Paul and not, say, Wayzata.) Taylor Dahlin wrote about We Love Minneapolis in June. She noted that it’s chaired by (GOP donor) Andrea Corbin, and run by Joe Radinovich and Nico Woods. (Two of the most conservative people in the Minnesota DFL.) The money overwhelmingly came from landlords with large holdings; progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many noted that 68% of their money came from landlords responsible for hundreds of property violations.
  • There is Thrive Minneapolis. In July, We Love Minneapolis shut down and Thrive Minneapolis seems to be the replacement. Taylor wrote about this group in July. She noted that it’s chaired by Martha Holton Dimick (the very conservative prosecutor who ran against Mary Moriarty in 2022), and again heavily funded by landlords and developers, many of whom do not live in Minneapolis.
  • There is All of Mpls, which is doing endorsements. Legally I am sure they are not actually the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat but if you click on the website you might be forgiven for thinking they basically look like the Frey campaign wearing a funny hat, especially since they have a link to “Thank Mayor Frey” (with a canned, adulatory e-mail). They have endorsed Becka Thompson in Ward 12, which is frankly inexcusable, and if I were Shelley Madore, I’d be pretty annoyed about that. I described them two years ago as “a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.” In retrospect I’m not sure that’s harsh enough. What they want is for Mayor Frey, who is frankly incompetent even if you like his politics, to have a rubber-stamp City Council.
  • On the other side there is the progressive PAC Minneapolis for the Many. I like Minneapolis for the Many! They also do endorsements.

One final note about some of the people involved in Love/Thrive/All Of Mpls. On September 9th there was a Zoom meeting of the DFL Feminist Caucus where the people in charge and their friends engaged in some really gross treatment of trans Democrats who showed up and ran for offices. (There’s an open letter about what happened at that meeting here.) Joe Radinovich was there and voting with the hostile majority. Martha Holton Dimick nominated Latonya Reeves, who was one of the people huffing and eye-rolling over the concept of respecting someone’s pronouns. These people are out of step with things I consider to be core DFL values. If someone has sought and accepted these endorsements, I do not trust them. (Also, the reason the old guard of the DFL Feminist Caucus closed ranks was to defend the right of their friend to continue to hold party office despite her involvement in a fatal crash that has been charged as vehicular homicide. I’ve seen this sort of “how dare you show up in our clubhouse and make trouble” gatekeeping in other contexts and it’s toxic and awful.)

So! Now that you know all that, let’s move on.

Michael Baskins

Michael Baskins was funded by We Love Minneapolis but then not endorsed by All Of Mpls. I wondered why this was and did a little digging. I’m not sure but possibly it’s because he’s being taken to campaign finance court for spending $1758 on designer suits and clothing? Also his website was not proofread, to the point that his “Endorsements” page has a stock photo and what I think is stock text (“Personal data is only stored when voluntarily given by you for a determined purpose e.g. in context of a registration, a survey, a contest, or in performance of a contract….”) I would absolutely not vote for him.

Shelley Madore

Shelley Madore was a suburban state legislator for one term, and moved to Minneapolis in 2018. Her website tries hard to put a progressive spin on her beliefs but she also answered the All of Mpls screening questionnaire and you can see her responses here. One response that caught my eye was about the Labor Standards Board that Mayor Frey vetoed: she wants the 50/50 composition (half workers, half business owners) that Frey and Vetaw advocated for (the version that passed the council was a 3-way split with community stakeholders also included). (Mayoral Candidate DeWayne Davis had a good comment on what that board would have meant: he said that business owners already have the ear of the mayor. A Labor Standards Board should exist to give workers the opportunity to be heard.)

Madore’s answers to that questionnaire are overwhelmingly in line with what the landlords and downtown council and so on would want from her. She centers their problems, opposes any form of rent control, treats “Public Safety” as a thing that is provided entirely by cops, and is pro-shotspotter.

Also she’s backed by All of Mpls and We Love/Thrive Minneapolis and for all the reasons given above, that’s reason enough not to vote for her.

Max Theroux

Max Theroux’s website didn’t show up on Google but after I initially posted that he didn’t have a website, his campaign manager contacted me with the link. He is a U of M student and his major issues are affordable housing, policing (he wants lots, lots more of it) and street repairs. He has experience as a legislative intern and thinks that a district that’s half students should have a student representing them at City Hall. I would not rank him.

Robin Wonsley

Robin Wonsley was first elected in 2021 (defeating Cam Gordon) and I am happy with a lot of the stuff Robin has done. She spearheaded a sidewalk plowing pilot. (I love the idea of public sidewalk plowing and would happily pay for that. Of course, here in St. Paul we’d probably want to start with public alley plowing.) She was one of the authors of a new policy to charge a fee that goes to the city when someone wants to hire an off-duty police officer. (This entirely makes sense to me: off-duty cops use city property in off-duty work; and it makes them significantly less available for overtime work for the city while also wearing them out. The police officer who shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk had worked a seven-hour security gig immediately before starting his ten-hour policing shift.) Robin also championed a new city policy to charge our largest carbon emitters a fee, which Frey vetoed but the Council overrode. (Here’s the thing I hit a wall on researching: this apparently was supposed to start being charged in July. Was it? Someone on Bluesky said yes but I couldn’t find any news articles about it, possibly because Google wanted to surface all the stories about the veto and the veto override. But you know what, it’s fine, I do not need to actually know this, I can give Robin the credit for pushing it through and just put the post up, it’s fine.)

And needless to say, not only is she NOT endorsed by All of Mpls or We Heart/Thrive Minneapolis, Thrive Minneapolis treats her as PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE in the slide show someone leaked.

I would totally vote for Robin Wonsley, and not rank anyone else in Ward 2.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 1

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I’m happy to bring you another pretty quick one. The tl;dr is to vote for incumbent Elliott Payne, but you can read the whole thing and it won’t take long.

Elliott Payne (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Brian Strahan
Edwin B. Fruit

Brian Strahan

Earlier in his campaign, Brian Strahan was backed by the (landlord-funded Frey superpac) “We Love Minneapolis,” which spent around $10K ahead of the caucuses/convention. He went on to lose endorsement on the first ballot by a landslide, 82%-17% or 178-36 in terms of actual votes, which means he spent $279 per supporter at the convention.

Which is even funnier given that he doesn’t live in the ward. Brian wrote in to say that he does in fact live in the ward; he moved on August 1st. (He also wanted to note that he lived very close to the ward boundary and only had to move three blocks.) He voted in Ward 3 in the SD 60 special election in January 2025, and he was a Ward 3 delegate in 2023 and 2017.

I got asked last weekend (I was doing a “politics hour” at a local SF convention) about the problem of politicians getting doxxed. I said that I don’t know how to solve this problem; on one hand, in the wake of a political assassination, I have a lot of sympathy for candidates and politicians who do not want their home address to be easy-to-find public information. But on the other hand, we have a real problem with people running for office in districts and wards where they don’t live, especially if they’re wealthy enough to just rent another apartment and pretend they live in it (or if they’re landlords who can pretend to live in one of their vacant properties). Anyway, Brian Strahan either doesn’t live in Ward 1, or committed voter fraud by voting in Ward 3 earlier this year (ETA: as noted above, he moved August 1st) and possibly this is why “All of Mpls,” the other landlord-and-developer-funded conservative superPAC that backs Frey and is trying to get him a more conservative City Council withdrew their endorsement in the Ward 1 race. (ETA: they now list him as an endorsed candidate.)

Edwin B. Fruit

Edwin B. Fruit is the Socialist Workers Party candidate, which means that instead of having his own website, he links to “The Militant,” where you can go over and read their claim that the Gaza genocide is a “slander” promoted by the “liberal bourgeois media.” Other than that: Edwin ran for this seat in 2021, and has run for office in Iowa (for US House in 2002) and in Seattle (for City Council in 2013, as a write-in). He was party to a lawsuit in Maryland in 1989 challenging filing fees for ballot access. I would not vote for him for anything.

Elliott Payne

Elliott is endorsed by the DFL and by basically every progressive group in the city. He’s been a major advocate for transit and for police reform, and has passed a number of tenant protections, like extending the pre-eviction notice period from 14 days to 30. He also holds regular “community office hours,” where constituents can come chat with him in person. I think Elliott Payne is pretty great and I would absolutely vote for him.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Elections 2025: Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET)

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Do not skip this one! You need to vote, and you need to tell your friends to vote, and you need to tell them how to vote. The tl;dr is that you should vote 1. Eric Harris Bernstein; 2. Steve Brandt. Read on for more information.

This is a two-seat race with three people running. MPR has a helpful video explaining how instant-runoff voting works in a multi-seat race. (If I tried to explain it, it would be very confusing; the video actually makes it genuinely more clear.)

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Steve Brandt (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Eric Harris Bernstein
Bob Fine (DFL-endorsed)

The BET sets the property tax levy for Minneapolis — this means that they determine the amount of money that the city can raise through property taxes, which is then split up based on the value of property people own. (You can play around with the property tax estimator if you’re curious what other people’s bills look like.) How that money then gets spent is determined by the city budget, made by the City Council and the Mayor. The BET can also decide to sell city bonds.

There are six people on the BET: in addition to the two people elected directly, there’s the mayor; the Council President; the Council Member who chairs the Council committee whose charge includes the budget; and one Park Board Commissioner. You can see the current makeup of the board here.

This is a low-profile elected job where you very much need people who are nerdy about budgets and finance, detail-oriented, and ethical. It’s paid, but not very much — $400/month (or $0 if you’re also on City Council or the Mayor.) If you’ve ever tried to recruit someone to be treasurer for a small volunteer-run organization, you have probably noticed that detail-oriented ethical budget and finance nerds are in short supply.

Good news, though, we’ve got two running!

Steve Brandt

Steve Brandt was elected four years ago and has done a fine job. Among other things, he supported colleague Samantha Pree-Stinson’s proposal to livestream their monthly meetings and make the video available. (Samantha is not running for re-election.) It appears that 132 people have watched the August meeting.

Steve is a retired journalist, and has brought his interest in follow-up questions to working on the board; he recently supported a property tax increase but on the condition that the mayor and City Council do a study on other ways to raise revenue. (From Steve’s website: “One proposal I support is to extend downtown’s liquor and restaurant taxing zone to include all of the North Loop’s bars and restaurants. That means that the owners of these businesses will have a level playing field instead of some having to bill for the tax and others not.”)

His list of supporters includes lots of people I don’t like, but in this case I think that’s fine. What I think we’re all in agreement on is that we appreciate Steve’s solid competence.

Eric Harris Bernstein

Eric Harris Bernstein joined the race too late to ask for DFL endorsement, which is unfortunate. (Samantha Pree-Stinson was originally planning to run for re-election, and withdrew from the race in early August due to health issues.) It’s unfortunate he didn’t have the opportunity to get endorsed, because he’s a terrific candidate. Eric is a progressive policy analyst who started out in policy and discovered “a passion for taxes.” He has worked since 2020 for We Make Minnesota, a coalition of labor and progressive groups organizing specifically around taxes and a more equitable tax code.

He is bringing both progressive values and a ton of actual expertise on taxation to the table. That’s actually genuinely rare in a new candidate for BET and I am really excited by the prospect of adding him to the board! I also listened to the WedgeLive interview with him and highly recommend it if you’d like to know more about his approach, or for that matter, more about what the BET does. (I linked to the WedgeLive YouTube channel but you can also listen to it as a podcast.)

Bob Fine

The Minneapolis DFL Convention got a lot of news coverage but one thing that got kind of skipped over in the coverage is that the convention skipped over debate and Q&A and everything else and endorsed Steve Brandt and Bob Fine for BET, I think basically because they were the two people showing up to ask for endorsement (Samantha Pree-Stinson was not seeking DFL endorsement) and because people wanted to get to the mayoral endorsement vote before they ran out of time. Which was valid, but unfortunate because in my opinion, Bob Fine really should not have been endorsed.

First of all, I think it’s worth noting, he sent out zero communications ahead of the convention (unlike Steve, who sent out a set of e-mail messages to the delegates talking about his values and accomplishments) and (ETA: as of September 9th, when I posted this) he has no website, no campaign Facebook, nothing on any social media that I could find, no information about why he wants this office or what he plans to do if he’s elected. He ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 2013, and his LinkedIn still references that race, and there’s nothing else that I could find! (ETA: here’s the website he put up in mid-September.)

Back in 2013, he gave an interview to MPR where he pledged to cut the city levy by 5% while refusing to specify what cuts he’d make to achieve that goal. (“All you have to do is audit city departments.”) This article also mentions that he’s a Faribault slumlord: “Among his holdings is a 20-unit apartment building in downtown Faribault. City records show building inspectors complained to its manager ‘numerous times’ about a malfunctioning elevator in the 143-year-old building. In 2011, they threatened to close part of the building if the problems weren’t addressed. Other records show recent problems with cockroaches, illegally installed air conditioners and a broken dumpster.” (Fine’s defense was that he was just the owner, not the manager. I don’t know if he still owns the building.)

All of that is actually problematic enough. But there’s more. Fine spent a number of years on the Park Board; in 2003, he forced through the hiring of an old buddy as superintendent of the Parks system. This was covered in a 2010 City Pages article that vanished with the City Pages archive but which you can still access through Archive.org. He ran for Park Board again in 2017 (I wrote about it here) and again in 2021 (I wrote about it here).

In his 2021 race for the Park Board, he was endorsed by the crowd that wanted to keep an 18-hole golf course at Hiawatha. Also from that race, he said at a LWV forum that homelessness was “far and away something that is not the mission of the Minneapolis Park Board. Neither is it a mission of the School Board, or the library system.” My comment at the time was that both the Minneapolis Public Schools and the library system deal with homelessness every day and do, in fact, treat it as part of their mission; his ignorance here should have embarrassed him.

Anyway. The fact that he showed up, got endorsed, and then completely dropped out of sight and has no website (ETA: did not get a website up until mid-September) or anything is frankly not a great sign! But his history with Gurban is all by itself a legitimate reason to not elect him again.

Vote (1) Eric Harris Bernstein, (2) Steve Brandt. And tell your friends! Because again, this is a race a lot of people don’t pay much attention to, and there are absolutely people who will show up on November 4th and vote for the DFL-endorsed candidates.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)

Elections 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 12

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The tl;dr here is to vote for Aurin Chowdhury; I door-knocked for her in 2023 and I have had no regrets about my support.

On the ballot:

Aurin Chowdhury
Becka Thompson
Edward Bear Stops

Edward Bear Stops

Edward Bear Stops is a 24-year-old whose website looks progressive and inoffensive but who gets weirder the more you look. His campaign Twitter bio describes him as the “President and Founder of SoulFull.” SoulFull is a nonprofit where the first page shows you that they have an official certificate of nonprofit incorporation and the Team page has a picture of Edward looking very devout. They do seem to do something useful, unlike a lot of nonprofits founded by fringe candidates: they hand out free sandwiches on alternate Saturdays. SoulFull’s Instagram has a lot of photos of the sandwiches.

He also has a YouTube channel. I don’t have the patience to sit through long videos of people talking about God when I’m trying to suss out their political beliefs but I got pretty strong “my career goal is Cult Leader” vibes, and also somewhere in my deep dive I found his Facebook, which has campaign stuff recently but religious stuff in the recent past and the further down you scroll, the clearer it is that he believes himself to be a prophet and on an entirely literal mission from God.

I wish him luck with his nonprofit, I would encourage him to NOT start a cult, and I don’t think anyone should vote for him.

Becka Thompson

Becka Thompson is currently serving on the Park Board and is in my opinion the single worst person currently holding public office in Minneapolis.

I’m going to start by talking about her racism. In March, ahead of the DFL endorsing convention, she objected to the idea that “MAGA has no place in Minneapolis.” In May, she wrote in a campaign e-mail that she might not have “the desired amount of melanin” and then backed down and apologized. Then in July, she referred to Ward 10 City Council rep Aisha Chughtai as “a nice, young, you know — ethnic woman” in a campaign video and then had to apologize again.

And honestly, this isn’t new! Back when she was running for Park Board in 2021, I was really appalled by what I found, which included her complaining that the police officers who aided and abetted Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd were “overcharged.” Elsewhere on her blog she described the murder of George Floyd as follows: “What transpired later was that the man in the car ended up dead and four police officers ended up in jail.”

Moving on to other things I do not like! She also sued John Edwards (of WedgeLive) and Taylor Dahlin (a WedgeLive associate) over a website they had nothing to do with that was also very very clearly satire. (You can see an archive of it if you want. But also, it says she’s running to represent Ward 14. There isn’t a Ward 14. It’s clearly a joke.) When this got tossed she filed multiple other lawsuits, all similarly frivolous. This was an abuse of the legal system to suppress criticism, and the sort of bullshit I expect from Trump and his cultists, not a supposed Democrat in the city of Minneapolis. It is legal to make fun of politicians! And to criticize them!

Next issue. She doesn’t actually live in Ward 12. She currently holds a Park Board seat in North Minneapolis. That’s legal, so long as she moves by early October. She posted in late July saying that she was about to “start the process of moving in” with her uncle, a resident of Ward 12. (Hopefully by early October she will also resign from the Park Board.) While on the Park Board she’s used data requests and an alias to dig up information on colleagues, according to one of those colleagues.

In terms of policies she says she wants, she’s basically toeing the Minneapolis conservative line: she wants more cops, lower taxes, and to get rid of the 2040 plan. She’s opposed to living wages for workers.

But you know what, even if you’re conservative, you should consider that Becka, if elected, will make your side look really really really really really really bad. She will say racist stuff that will make people say “oh. is that YOUR City Councillor? I’m sorry!” She will post weird videos and spread conspiracy theories. Even if you like her politics better than Aurin’s, don’t vote for Becka!

Aurin Chowdhury

Aurin has only been on the City Council for about a year and a half. I think she’s done good work so far. Her accomplishment list shows her as someone who has both centered her work on progressive values and sought pragmatic solutions to problems. Her more centrist colleague Emily Koski has endorsed her, describing her as a “bridge-builder.”

I would, without a moment of hesitation, vote for Aurin Chowdhury for Minneapolis City Council. I would not rank either of the other candidates.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps. This is a ton of work and 2025 is a dumpster fire.)

Elections 2025: Minneapolis City Council, Ward 13

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Starting with this one because there is just not a whole lot to say. Here’s who’s running:

Linea Palmisano (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Bob “Again” Carney, Jr. (“Climate Revolution Elephant”)

Linea Palmisano is one of the centrists on the Minneapolis City Council, and a staunch ally of Jacob Frey; I am not a fan.

Bob “Again” Carney is a perennial candidate whose hobby is running for stuff. He’s run for governor, mayor, US Senate, US House (though maybe not Ilhan’s seat, I think he ran in a special in some other district), I can’t even remember how many times. When he ran in 2023 for this same City Council seat, he had a website. I commented at the time, “All you really need to know about BobAgain is that his website still says he’s running for governor, and when he participated in the Ward 13 LWV forum he said that if he won the election, he would refuse to take office, thus (according to his theories) allowing Linea to stay in office.” He no longer even has a website that I could find (presumably he let the “votebobagain” registration expire).

I don’t want either of these people and Linea is in absolutely no danger of losing to Bob Again. I would abstain from this race in the hopes that seeing unenthusiastic turnout for Linea would inspire someone decent to run four years from now.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps. This is a ton of work and 2025 is a dumpster fire.)

Election 2025: Minneapolis & St. Paul municipal elections

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Welcome to the 2025 Election Season! I am planning to write about the Minneapolis City Council race, the Minneapolis Park Board race (both at-large and the districts), the Minneapolis BET (Board of Estimation and Taxation) race, and of course the Minneapolis mayoral race. St. Paul just has a mayoral race; I will write about that, too. If I missed anything, like a special school board race please remind me in the comments. (Unless it’s in Roseville. I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis or St. Paul.)

I am planning to write about the Minneapolis mayoral race as early as I possibly get a post finished. In fact I want to get everything done early this year, because my October is going to be extremely busy. But where the mayoral race is concerned, I want all the people who “wait to hear what Naomi has to say about [candidate]” to see what I have to say so they can make up their mind and send money to their favorite of Jacob Frey’s opponents and maybe even go out and doorknock, while there’s still time for that to matter. This means that if there’s late breaking news I may have to update my post, but c’est la vie.

First, though, I’m going to warm up with some of the easy ones, where it’s “excellent incumbent vs. weirdo” or for that matter “incumbent I can’t stand but no one reasonable filed to run against her so it’s incumbent I don’t like vs. weirdo” (that would be Ward 13, where it’s Linea Palmisano vs. Bob Again.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because “number go up!” is very motivational for me (and having external motivation helps. This is a ton of work and 2025 is a dumpster fire.)