Election 2021: Minneapolis Mayor

If you’ve been waiting for my Kate Knuth vs. Sheila Nezhad deep dive, that’s not going to happen in this post. There are seventeen people running for Mayor of Minneapolis, and I’m pretty sure only three of them have any chance of winning (Kate, Sheila, and Jacob). This is going to be the post where I give you an overview of all the other candidates, because you do get three slots, and if you don’t want Jacob, you should not rank him at all.

Of the fourteen I’m going to talk about today, some are real candidates with serious policy proposals. But if you look for an endorsements page, you mostly won’t find one; if you look them up on social media, they have a handful of followers. (Or they have thousands but they never interact — you can purchase Twitter followers but it’s super obvious when you do.)

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Jacob Frey
Kate Knuth
Sheila Nezhad

(I’ll talk about those three in another post.)

Marcus Harcus (Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis)
Bob “Again” Carney Jr (Republican)
Laverne Turner (Republican)
Troy Benjegerdes (Farmer-Labor)
Paul E. Johnson (Equity in Motion)
Doug Nelson (Socialist Workers Party)
AJ Awed (DFL)
Nate “Honey Badger” Atkins (Libertarian Party)
Christopher W David (DFL)
Mike Winter (Independence-Alliance)
Kevin “No Body” Ward (Independent)
Clint Conner (DFL)
Mark Globus (DFL)
Perry, Jerrell (For the People)

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Election 2020: US Senate Primaries

I’m going to kick this off with an easy one.

Senator Tina Smith was appointed in 2017, ran to keep the seat for the remainder of the term in 2018, and is now running for a six-year regular Senate term. Senator Amy Klobuchar was re-elected to a six-year term in 2018 and is apparently not running for Vice President; if, say, she gets appointed to a presidential cabinet position sometime in early 2021, Tim Walz will get to appoint someone to fill her seat, and that person will then run in the 2022 election to serve out the rest of that term. Mentioning that just in case anyone’s wondering.

On the DFL ballot:

Tina Smith
Steve Carlson
Christopher Lovell Seymore, Sr.
Paula Overby
Ahmad R. Hassan

On the Republican ballot:

Jason Lewis
Bob “Again” Carney Jr.
Cynthia Gail
James Reibestein
John L. Berman

I always imagine Willy Wonka (the Gene Wilder version) singing “come with me…and you’ll be…in a world of pure imagination” when I hit the “Insert Read More tag” button, for some reason. Rivers of chocolate: probably cooler than political candidates. Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka: less of a weirdo than some of these people.

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