Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey wins re-election, fending off socialist challenger

MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey defeated democratic socialist Omar Fateh and 13 other challengers Wednesday during the final round of counting in the city’s ranked-choice voting election.

Frey, who secured a third term, led Fateh by about 10 percentage points after Tuesday night’s first round of counting but didn’t cross the 50%-plus-one-vote threshold he needed to win outright.

The way ranked-choice voting works in Minneapolis, if no candidate clears the threshold in the first round, candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated for the next round of counting, while second- and third-choice rankings are allocated to the surviving candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate has enough. Frey won after the second round in 2021.

Frey, a mainstream Democrat, and Fateh, a Democratic state senator who is a democratic socialist, led a 15-candidate field. The only other candidates drawing significant votes were the Rev. DeWayne Davis and businessman Jazz Hampton, who were further back.

Fateh, Davis and Hampton formed an alliance, urging their voters to rank one another, but not Frey, to make it harder for the incumbent to win.

Frey, who is Jewish, led Minneapolis through the turmoil following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white officer used his knee to pin his neck to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes. But his administration later negotiated agreements with the state and federal governments to remake a police department that lost hundreds of officers after Floyd’s death.

Fateh was hoping to become the first Muslim and first Somali American mayor of the city, which has the largest Somali population in the US. He drew comparisons with Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who won New York City’s mayoral race on Tuesday, because of their backgrounds and ideological similarities. Both are Muslim and come from immigrant families, although Fateh was born in the US. Like Mamdani, Fateh was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) group.

According to screenshots published by the Jewish News Syndicate over the summer, Fateh, in a DSA questionnaire, endorsed the anti-Israel BDS movement and pledged to “refrain from any and all affiliation” with so-called “Zionist lobby groups,” including the Jewish Community Relations Council, which serves as a go-between for elected officials and local Jewish communities. JNS also shared deleted social media posts from Fateh’s communications manager in which she said Israel “does not have a ‘right’ to exist” and “must be dismantled.”

Election officials said Minneapolis set a record for the most votes cast in a municipal election, with more than 147,000 residents voting. They said 55% of registered voters turned out, up slightly from the previous record of 54% in 2021. The City Council is scheduled to certify the final results and make them official on Monday.

In neighboring St. Paul, Democratic state Rep. Kaohly Her defeated incumbent Democratic Mayor Melvin Carter early Wednesday after trailing slightly in the first round of counting there. She will become the first woman and first Hmong American mayor of the state’s capital city, which has the largest Hmong population in the US.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.