This is definitely the race that people in my circle are the most undecided about. They’re not waffling over whether to go for Ole Savior, just to be clear: it’s basically a Walz vs. Murphy debate. And a lot of people are really undecided:
SUPER WITH YOU THERE, DAVID.
Here’s who’s on the ballot:
Erin Murphy and Erin Maye-Quade
Lori Swanson and Rick Nolan
Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan
Tim Holden and James P. Mellin II
Olé Savior and Chris Edman
There are ten candidates on the St. Paul ballot. I’m going to break them into two groups: the people who might conceivably win the mayoral race and the people who are absolutely not going to win, so you don’t need to read about them unless you’re really just here for the snark, anyway.
On the ballot with at least some chance of winning:
Elizabeth Dickinson
Melvin Carter
Dai Thao
Tom Goldstein
Pat Harris
(Elizabeth Dickinson and Tom Goldstein don’t have a very high chance of winning, but if you were holding a mayoral candidate forum you’d probably invite them.)
On the ballot for some reason or other:
Trahern Crews
Barnabas Joshua Y’shua
Chris Holbrook
Sharon Anderson
Tim Holden who for some reason is on the ballot as Holden Holden
And because this is St. Paul, everyone gets six slots. You can rank more than half of these people, which, let’s face it, is more slots than most of us are going to have any use for. I said this over on the ranked-choice post and I’ll say it again: figure out who your first, second, and third choices are among Dai Thao, Pat Harris, and Melvin Carter. If there’s any of those three that you do not want to see as mayor, you will in fact want to make sure the other two are on your ballot.
I’m going to start by talking about the five non-leading candidates. I’ll come back to the five leading candidates tomorrow in a separate post.
Will Tell Stories For Food 