Incumbent Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is declared the victor in the second round of balloting following Tuesday's election.
Frey had this to say to those who didn’t vote for him:
"Whether you voted for me or not, I will be a mayor that will work hand-in-hand with you on some of the most difficult challenges that we face," the mayor said Wednesday afternoon. "Whether you supported me or not, we're gonna work together."
After struggling to see eye-to-eye with a growing democratic socialist Minneapolis City Council, Frey is more optimistic he can work with them moving forward. He'll be assisted by a couple of new councilmembers that align more with his own views, such as Ward 7 councilmember-elect Elizabeth Shaffer.
"I can't control what other people on the city council say or do," Frey said. "There needs to be a mutuality. We need to hold each other to a common thread of decency. We need to hold each other to a common thread of civility in Minneapolis."
Shaffer, a former Minneapolis park board commissioner, was backed by Frey, and defeated incumbent Katie Cashman, one of the more progressive members of the Council.
"You know, we have to learn how to work together," she told Vineeta Sawkar on the WCCO Morning News. "And I think, hopefully, through this experience, we're sending the message that we have to respect all viewpoints and that we have to seek a common ground for our city that's greater than our individual ideologies."
The race between Shaffer and Cashman was the highest spending council race in the city, but Shaffer told WCCO that it was still all about local politics.
"Two thirds of my funding came from actually Ward 7, and if you look at Minneapolis, it was even higher," she explains. "Minnesota almost 95%. So it was a true response, I think, to my previous leadership and the desire for change in Ward 7."
Frey also talked Tuesday afternoon about his reelection and the record turnout in the city. Minneapolis broke the record for registered voters - 55% - who turned out.
"The people rose up, they spoke out," said Frey. "And regardless of which candidate you ultimately chose, here's the thing, the people that voted care deeply about our city and I care deeply about them."
Frey says he plans to reset and hit the ground running, working on over-arching priorities like affordable housing and safety, police reform and economic inclusion, and also more tangible issues, working alongside the council.
National Democrats take a victory lap too
Democratic National Committee Chairman and former Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin took a victory lap of sorts after some major victories by Democrats Tuesday night, including a dominating performance in Virginia where the Democrats swept all the major races.
"You know, I heard Donald Trump say today that, you know, or JD Vance say today that, 'they only won in blue states.' Well, that's bulls***," Martin said on Tuesday. "We won all over the country in red counties and purple counties and in blue counties."
Democrats on Tuesday won governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey, the only states electing new chief executives this year. They also swept a trio of state Supreme Court contests in swing-state Pennsylvania and ballots measures from Colorado to Maine.
"This was a complete dominance by the Democrats throughout the country last evening up and down the ballot throughout the country," Martin said.
President Donald Trump took a victory lap of his own on Tuesday, speaking about the economy on the one-year anniversary of his successful election, boasting of cheaper prices and saying the U.S. is the envy of the globe even while the Republican Party faced a rebuke from voters anxious about their own finances in Tuesday's off-year elections.
“These are the things you have to talk about,” Trump told a packed arena at Miami's Kaseya Center that included top business executives, global athletes and political leaders. “If people don't talk about them, then you can do not so well in elections.”
The president also said one reason Republicans struggled is that he wasn't on the ballot.
“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” he said in a Truth Social post.
It marked a significant effort from Trump to put a positive spin on the economy at a time when Americans remain uneasy about the cost of living and their own financial security — and when major campaigns in Tuesday's elections — from New York to Virginia — were centered on affordability and the economy.
Trump's comments echoed sentiments from his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose White House insisted that the Democrat's political standing would improve if they better communicated his economic accomplishments.