Tag Archives: Minneapolis Mayor

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.)

Election 2021: Minneapolis Mayoral Race. Kate, Sheila, Jacob.

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I left this one for last because of all the races, it’s the one that you’re going to have the least trouble finding information about.

There are seventeen people running for mayor of Minneapolis, most of whom will be dropped after the first ballot. I wrote about fourteen of them in another post. The three people with a strong chance of winning:

Jacob Frey
Sheila Nezhad
Kate Knuth

tl;dr don’t rank Jacob. Vote either Kate/Sheila or Sheila/Kate. I’m going to talk about what I see as their distinctive strengths but I’m not going to tell you how to rank them; I am endorsing both.

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Election 2021: Minneapolis Mayor

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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 2021: Minneapolis and Saint Paul City Elections

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GOD DAMMIT I NEED TO GET STARTED ON THIS.

In 2021, both Minneapolis and Saint Paul will hold municipal races.

In Saint Paul, the ballot includes the mayoral race; a school board race (3 full-term seats, 1 partial-term seat vacated by someone moving); and a charter amendment to impose rent control.

In Minneapolis, the ballot includes the mayoral race; the city council seats (all of which will be only 2 years — there will be another city council race in 2023 due to redistricting); Park Board district seats; Park Board At Large seats (3); the Board of Estimate and Taxation; and three charter amendments (one to allow rent control, one to replace the police department with a public safety department, and one to give the mayor more power).

There are 17 candidates for mayor in Minneapolis; there are 8 candidates for mayor in Saint Paul.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE IF YOU WISH TO VOTE BY MAIL: Last year, you were able to request your ballot by filling out an online form. This year you will have to submit a downloadable form — which can still be done online, but you’ll have to download a PDF, fill it in, and e-mail it back, it’s a different and somewhat more complicated process. More here. This isn’t the Secretary of State being difficult: the actual state statute allows for absentee ballot applications to be submitted electronically “for a federal, state, or county election.” If you want “municipal” added to this, talk to your legislator.

In the meantime, I’m going to remind everyone that I had a book released this April, Chaos on CatNet. Signed copies are usually available from Dreamhaven and from the current mail-order-only incarnation of Uncle Hugo’s. Books make great holiday gifts, but should be ordered early this year — supply chain issues are happening all over.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, I’m going to start by pointing my readers at the school nurse from Olson Middle School, who urgently needs a refrigerator for things like student medications.

And one more (final?) visit to the Minneapolis mayor’s race

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A bunch of people have asked me why I am so concerned about Jacob Frey and developer money, I saw an online conversation involving Nekima Levy-Pounds that I wanted to talk about, and I got asked why I didn’t say more about Raymond Dehn. So whee, one. more. post.

I’m going to skip the linked list of candidates and just put my analysis below the cut.

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Minneapolis Mayoral Race, Final Days

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Because various things have come out or turned up or been added to people’s websites since I first started researching the race two months ago (!) I’m doing a followup post on just the five candidates that I think might plausibly win this election.

Running (and likely to win the race) for Mayor of Minneapolis:

Raymond Dehn DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Jacob Frey DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Tom Hoch DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Betsy Hodges DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Nekima Levy-Pounds DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR

You get to rank three. Analysis under the cut.

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Mpls Mayoral Race: Rosenfeld, Simpson, Sparrow, Wilson

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You get two batches in one day because this last batch, well, yeah. This is the last four! For anyone who’s seeing just this post, I’m doing the Minneapolis mayoral candidates in batches of four, alphabetically. (Mostly. I screwed up the order in one post.)

David Rosenfeld SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY
Ian Simpson THE IDEA PARTY
Captain Jack Sparrow BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE
David John Wilson RAINBOWS BUTTERFLIES UNICORNS

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Mpls Mayoral Race: Levy-Pounds, Lischeid, Nik, Rahman

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Reminder: I’m writing about these candidates in batches, alphabetically. So if your fave isn’t in this batch, check the other posts.

Nekima Levy-Pounds DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Ronald Lischeid PEOPLE OVER POLITICS
L.A. Nik INDEPENDENT
Aswar Rahman DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR

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Mpls Mayoral Race: Gers, Hoch, Hodges, Iverson

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On to the next four candidates! (Just to reiterate: I’m profiling candidates four to a post. I’m going in alphabetical order. If you’re looking for Frey, he was in the last post. If you’re looking for Levy-Pounds, she’ll be in the next post.)

Charlie Gers LIBERTARIAN PARTY
Tom Hoch DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Betsy Hodges DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Gregg A. Iverson DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR

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Mpls Mayoral Race: Benjegerdes, Dehn, Frey, Flowers

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OKAY. ::cracks knuckles:: Let’s get this election-blogging-show on the road. The first set of four (edited to note: these are the first four alphabetically, I will be covering all sixteen candidates):

Troy Benjegerdes FARMER LABOR
Raymond Dehn DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Jacob Frey DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Al Flowers DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR

Four years ago, I suggested that when picking three candidates (out of 35) to rank, the two most basic questions are, “who here could plausibly do the job?” and “who here could plausibly win?”

Occasionally, candidates show up really mad when I say they’re not a serious candidate. Here’s how I know that you are definitely not a serious candidate for a job like “mayor” — if you have no campaign manager, no fundraising link, no way for interested people to volunteer, no one who appears to be volunteering for you, and no one who’s endorsed you. (If I can’t even figure any of that out because you have no website, then you definitely are not a serious candidate.) Even if all your ideas are perfectly sensible, if you’re not doing this fairly basic stuff, you’re not a serious candidate.

In most cases, not all their ideas are perfectly sensible. They’re a crank. Or they have no actual ideas. Or they’re running 100% on platitudes. (There are serious candidates who run 100% on platitudes, but they also have high-powered endorsements. This might seem unfair; you can take comfort from the fact that I, for one, do notice when someone’s running 100% on platitudes.)

Anyway, on to the first set of candidates!

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