Tag Archives: St. Paul 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.)

St. Paul Mayoral Race, Part II

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There are ten candidates on the ballot; here are the five that are doing enough fundraising and campaigning that they’re widely viewed as viable:

Elizabeth Dickinson
Melvin Carter
Dai Thao
Tom Goldstein
Pat Harris

The St. Paul ballot, unlike the Minneapolis ballot, doesn’t list party affiliations. Elizabeth Dickinson is a Green; the other four are all DFLers.

Continue reading →

Election 2017: City Races in Minneapolis and St. Paul

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I really need to get going on election blogging, but I have a novel that’s due in November, and I wanted to get a first draft done before I dived into this.

The draft is done! Done-ish. (I need to do a first pass before I send it to beta readers.) It is a YA novel based on my short story Cat Pictures Please, to be published by Tor YA. Anyway, I’ll be getting to this soon, and I took a peek at the city ballots to see just what I was in for.

Both Minneapolis and St. Paul have city races this year. St. Paul’s mayor, Chris Coleman, is not running again, so it’s an open seat. Minneapolis’s mayor, Betsy Hodges, is completing her first term and a number of people are dissatisfied with her, so she’s viewed as vulnerable. Minneapolis also has races for Park Board, City Council, and There are also races for Park Board, City Council, and Board of Estimate and Taxation. (That one’s not a competitive race; if I’m reading it right, there are two seats up for election, and exactly two people running for those seats, both of them incumbents.) In St. Paul, there’s also a School Board race.

Last time, Minneapolis had thirty-five candidates running for Mayor. In the intervening four years, they raised the cost of filing to run from $20 to $500, which has significantly cut down on the number of people doing it — it’s now only 16, so a little under half the number who ran last time. Of those 16, there are 5 or 6 with a reasonable shot at actually winning; 2-3 more who are treating their own candidacy seriously even if no one else is; and a couple of weirdos. I’m really curious whether David John Wilson of the Rainbows Butterflies Unicorns party is John Charles Wilson the Laurist Communist but with a new name and political party? His website isn’t loading for me.

There are three people running for City Council in my old ward; not sure about other wards, and I need an address to plug in to get the Secretary of State site to cough up a sample ballot.

Nine people are running for three Park Board At Large seats. There’s also three people running for the District 5 Park Board Seat. (Again, I’ll need to go hunting for the info on who’s running in the other districts.)

Minneapolis residents can rank three candidates in each race.

In St. Paul, we have ten people running for mayor. There are three I’d describe as front-runners, a couple more who are serious candidates, and one person who I think gets messages from space aliens through her dental fillings. We also have six people running for three School Board seats. In St. Paul, we get to rank up to six candidates for mayor. We get to vote for three school board candidates (because there are three open seats) but we don’t get to rank them, because the method of choosing school board candidates is determined by the State Legislature. (Don’t you envy the people who get to hand over ballots and explain that to people? If you do, you can sign up to do it! They are ALWAYS looking for election judges.)

Anyway! I will be back to start work on this soon. If you live in Minneapolis and want to be sure I cover your City Council race and/or your Park Board race, please leave an address in your precinct in my comments so I can plug that in to the SoS site. (And if you want to just pull up your own sample ballot, you can get it here: http://myballotmn.sos.state.mn.us. This site will also tell you where you go to vote.)