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.

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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.)