Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Andrea Jenkins
Soren Stevenson
Bob Sullentrop
Terry White

Andrea Jenkins has been elected twice before, and this year, weirdly enough, is the first time she’s had meaningful opposition. (Bob Sullentrop ran against her last time. In 2017, when she was first elected, she wasn’t even opposed for endorsement, and her opponents on the ballot were all flakes. Yes, that includes Terry White, who’s running against her again this year.)

Let me quickly touch on Bob and Terry before I get into the real race, which is between Andrea and Soren.

Bob Sullentrop

Bob Sullentrop is a surly Republican who not only hates bike lanes, he actively wants to prioritize car convenience over really basic pedestrian safety: “Another issue that Bob is concerned about is the proliferation of bicycle lanes in the city, along with lower speed limits for cars and timing of signal lights such that motorists are stopped at almost every controlled intersection and in some cases forced to wait there for several minutes until given a green light.” Bob, you are not more important just because you’re driving a car, and your desire to speed through Minneapolis is not a higher priority than the desire of people moving through the city on foot to cross streets without being run over. During the Ward 8 forum he also talked repeatedly about “getting rid of” homeless people. Don’t vote for this guy.

Terry White

Terry White ran back in 2017 and it’s sort of hilarious to compare his stances then to his stances now. In 2017, he was running as a Green, a big fan of the city’s climate action plan and the Complete Streets policy, and talked about prioritizing transportation for pedestrians, bikers, and transit over cars. In 2023 he wants to defend the importance of parking spots and thinks that bike infrastructure is a waste of money. His housing takes aren’t terrible, but I am not impressed by him. Also, even if you think he’s awesome and want to list him first, it’s going to come down to Andrea vs. Soren, so you’ll want to pick a backup.

Andrea Jenkins

“Why don’t people like Andrea Jenkins? She sounds so cool.” –a friend of mine from another state, who mostly just knows that Andrea is a Black trans woman who’s also a poet and artist as well as serving on the Minneapolis City Council. On paper, she sounds amazingly cool, and one of my questions that I tried to really examine while researching this race was, are people harder on her because she’s Black and trans?

I do think she gets more abuse because she’s a Black woman (as does LaTrisha Vetaw, for that matter) — if you look up strong Black woman trope you’ll find a lot of discussion of the problem where Black women are expected to show emotional strength even in the face of really unreasonable and upsetting stuff, and yeah, I have seen people complain about Andrea Jenkins responding to physical intimidation with anything other than smiling courtesy (while also not subjecting Emily Koski, Lisa Goodman, or Linea Palmisano to either the same abuse or the same scrutiny).

But there’s a difference between “abuse that a city-level elected official shouldn’t have to expect as part of the job” and “having people vigorously object to your decisions in office” and that second one, no, I don’t think people are harder on her — I think that if anything, she got a lot of extra benefit of the doubt. She represents a very progressive ward and has not represented them in a way that reflects what her constituents have demonstrated that they want. On the City Council, there’s a progressive faction (Chavez, Chughtai, Wonsley, Payne, Ellison) and a centrist faction (Koski, Palmisano, Rainville, Vetaw, Goodman, and obviously the mayor); Johnson, Osman, and Jenkins have been the swing votes. You can see a visual illustration of where everyone swung on the divided votes here — Jenkins is in fact the most conservative of the swing votes. Ward 8 passed rent control by a margin of 61%-39%. And yet, rent control failed to move forward this session because it got brought to a vote on Eid. I don’t think this was a conspiracy (the date of Eid is not as predictable as you’d think) but Andrea Jenkins’s response was deeply unsatisfying. She is Council President and the idea that her hands were just tied and the vote had to go forward is patently absurd. At the time, she said that someone had to make a proposal to delay it and no one did; I’m sorry, I cannot even begin to list the number of DFL meetings I’ve been at where the person running the meeting has said, “I would like to entertain a motion to [do a thing the chair thinks ought to happen]” and gotten an immediate chorus of “so moved.” She was running the meeting. If she’d wanted to delay the vote, there were lots of options at her disposal.

When I looked back for people’s past frustrations (by searching Twitter) I found a good illustration of Andrea at her absolute worst from August of this year. After police shot Black motorist Ricky Cobb II, Andrea sent out an e-mail that (a) misspelled his name and (b) had a fundraising link at the bottom. This really does kind of sum up the frustrations I see with Andrea: she wants credit for symbolic gestures while siding with the centrists on the actual tangible stuff, like when she approved the police contract with no progress on accountability or transparency, or when she voted against a proposal to make the police oversight board entirely citizens rather than a mix of citizens and police. (Worth noting — she’s better than, say, Linea, who picked the “better for the cops, who cares about accountability” option with every single vote. But she was the deciding vote on the amendment in question, which you’ll find on page 10 of the linked PDF.)

Soren Stevenson

Soren Stevenson had an eye shot out by the Minneapolis Police during a protest after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd; on police accountability specifically, I trust him a lot. He’s worked for the North Country Cooperative Foundation and as a lobbyist for the Minnesota Justice Coalition.

As I was starting work on this post (weeks ago now) part of what sidetracked me was the Hamas attack on Israel. I do not usually discuss Israel or anything Israel-adjacent if I can possibly avoid it. (I mean, honestly: no one with decision-making power on anything remotely related to Middle East policy cares what I think.) But I was really upset by the statement released by the Twin Cities DSA at the time, and on October 11th I contacted Soren (and the other DSA-endorsed candidates) to see if they had a comment. Soren got back to me in under a half hour with the following:

I condemn cruelty and violence against civilians in all its forms. The acts of Hamas against civilians are horrifying and unacceptable. The decades of violent oppression against Palestinian civilians and the cutting off of food and water to Gaza are also horrifying and unacceptable. I am committed to fighting antisemitism and cruelty in all its forms and in every arena in which I have authority. 

I am running for the Minneapolis City Council in no small part to address the cruelty that our City is responsible for by failing to hold violent, racist police accountable and through the City’s treatment of our unsheltered neighbors. It is cruel that we allow the police federation to continue to set the terms of our contract with them at the expense of our neighbors and it is cruel that we evict our unhoused neighbors throughout the city and trash their belongings with no serious plan to house them. At the heart of my campaign is fighting for a kinder, safer City, and I am fueled by my own personal experience and the experiences of our communities in doing so. My commitment to opposing cruelty did not waiver after the Minneapolis Police shot me for standing up for George Floyd. And it will not waiver when I am elected to City Council.

I really appreciated this response for a couple of reasons. First, because it came so very quickly. Second, because it acknowledged both that Hamas’s violence was unacceptable and that Israel’s violence towards the Palestinians for decades has been unacceptable. Third, because he succinctly identified the common thread here, which is the acceptance of cruelty as policy. Bob Sullentrop talked about “getting rid of the homeless” not in the sense of offering people housing but simply forcing people out of sight. That’s what destroying encampments is about: forcing unhoused people to find places to camp where Bob doesn’t have to look at them, doesn’t have to reckon with the fact that people are living in tents because there isn’t enough affordable housing that everyone can live indoors, doesn’t have to actually try to solve the problem. (Andrea Jenkins also voted against a proposal to require the city to confirm that shelter beds were available before clearing an encampment.)

Anyway: I like Soren, and I think Ward 8 deserves someone who’s committed to progressive policies, who will vote for police accountability and humane treatment of unhoused people. I would vote for Soren Stevenson.

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