2025 is an off-year election but there are still key, crucial races in Minnesota and across the U.S. this coming Tuesday, November 4. Two of those will elect a mayor in Minnesota's two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
In Minneapolis, where ranked choice voting creates a situation where a number of candidates are in the mix, one of the key issues they will need to tackle is around the Minneapolis police force.
Several years ago, following the murder of George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin, there were some in the city who went so far as to call for a defunding of the police department. One of those is current state Senator Omar Fateh who is running for mayor. He claimed at the time police should be defunded - but he now says he has changed his stance.
"Yes, in 2021 I did support a question which would have created a Department of Public Safety in which our police would be situated under," Fateh told the WCCO Morning News with Vineeta Sawkar. "But not, not in terms of defunding. In fact, last biennium, I worked with my colleagues to bring in $19 million in public safety aid."
Current Mayor Jacob Frey is running for a third term. He said that he believes Fateh still wants to follow through on this action, even though Fateh is saying otherwise.
"Senator Omar Fatah, who's very clearly said that he wants to defund the police," Frey explained to WCCO's Henry Lake. "By the way, it's not my just putting words in his mouth. He said this. And is now trying to back away from the position without really ever backing away from it at all."
Those two are pretty clear frontrunners in the race, but ranked choice can also create situations where other candidates can stay in the race as voters are allowed select their top three candidates on the ballot. That can result in multiple rounds of voting until a candidate reaches 50% of the vote. Candidates with the least amount of votes are then eliminated until that happens.
Minneapolis elections are officially nonpartisan, but the city charter allows candidates to align themselves with a party, which is shown under their name on the ballot. Fateh and Frey are identified as Democrats, with Fateh self-identifying as a Democratic Socialist, and has been supported by a number of Minneapolis City Councilmembers, who also recognize themselves as Democratic Socialists, and he's been endorsed by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar who represents the city in her district.
The other candidates that participated in debates - Attorney Jazz Hampton and DeWayne Davis, are also running as Democrats. There are a total of 15 people on the ballot.
"We need to ensure we're building trust between the community and officers," Hampton told WCCO's Vineeta Sawkar. "Having more opportunities to get to know our officers, building the number of officers we have. And the last thing, and this is really important, taking some of the work off of their plate. They're telling me they're doing too much work right now."
Davis, who was the co-chair of the Community safety work group that the mayor convened right after George Floyd was murdered, says the city needs police, but they've been forced to be responsible for too many things.
"There's no way that we can do public safety without our police, but we need our police to do what they do best," he told WCCO's Jason DeRusha this week. "So, what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that every one of the public safety ecosystem is fully resourced and operating at full capacity. That's what we in the Community Safety Work Group report. So the behavioral crisis response, fully resourced and operating fully, violence interrupters fully resourced at full capacity. The reason we need that to happen is so that the police can get that 911 response time down, but also that police can focus on investigations. We need to raise our clearance rates, especially of gun violence crimes."
Race sets up a showdown between Democrats and Democratic Socialists
There is no party endorsement in 2025 due to a messy, drama-filled city convention over the summer where Fateh was initially endorsed, but that was nullified later by the state DFL party due to inconsistencies in how the voting took place.
WCCO Political Analyst Blois Olson explains that the race in Minneapolis has brought out some new and controversial politics from some candidates, with Frey actually becoming a more moderate choice despite long being a left-leaning Democrat. Is a city like Minneapolis viable to have a Democratic Socialist run it? That's something voters will have to reckon with.
"When you hear DSA, it's about the values," says Fateh. That renters deserve affordable homes, workers deserve a livable wage, immigrants deserve protection. Our unhoused neighbors deserve dignity, and that folks that are living on the edges deserve our support over the millionaires and billionaires."
Mayor Frey - on the other hand - doesn't believe this ideological agenda can work.
"Whether that's around defunding the police, which he supported or rent control, which flat out doesn't work, whether that's saying that he wants to never close a homeless encampment, or a variety of other policies out there," Frey explained. "As mayor, I operate in the reality business."
Some, including Fateh, have been very critical of the federal government's actions with immigrants and supported a petition to even "arrest" ICE agents that wear face coverings.
"I'll call them new ideas that I think are a little shock to some people's system, like federal agents being arrested by local police," Olson notes. "Some of the louder voices, this is what I talked about last week on Sunday Take, there's loud voices, but we're not sure if they represent the mainstream of Minneapolis or the mainstream of Minnesota. Because let's face it, independent voters and moderate voters don't have an activist group out there holding news conferences all the time. And I think that's part of what we have to figure out this year going into next year is, where is middle Minnesota?"
Olson also notes that the race has sort of shaped up as Frey versus the other three significant candidates, Fateh, Hampton and Davis.
"Minneapolis is a race between a two-term incumbent, three candidates directly fundraising, organizing, holding rallies against that incumbent, Jacob Frey, and those three others are really kind of ganging up on Frey. Which, he's a big boy, he can handle it," Olson adds.