Minnesotans are infamously passive-aggressive. When a Minnesotan calls something "interesting", what they really mean is "good Lord, what a mess".
The Minneapolis mayor's race is...interesting.
If there's a campaign that's testing America's - or at least Blue America's - hunger for top-down government control of the means of production on a par with the New York mayoral election, it's the tilt for mayor of Minneapolis.
Omar Fateh is running to get on the DFL ballot for mayor against Jacob Frey, who came across as a national disgrace during the George Floyd riots - but is actually the "law and order" and "pro-police" DFL candidate, and has the brickbats from the DFL's progressive wing to prove it; he's sometimes referred to by the worst slur a Minneapolis DFLer can muster, as "a Republican".
Fateh is a second-generation American from DC who latched onto Minnesota's burgeoning Somali community, and is currently a State Senator - a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Democrat socialist Omar Fateh is the "Mamdani" of Minneapolis.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 13, 2025
These are the new leaders of the Democrat Party. pic.twitter.com/3FrEYAxgX3
He was endorsed earlier this month to run for mayor, against incumbent Frey, who's running for this third term. And it happened at a convention that was, even by Minneapolis DFL standards (Minneapolis DFL conventions make the South Korean Parliament look like coffee hour after a Lutheran service in Iowa), was shocking.
I'm not exaggerating:
Before the convention began, the Mpls DFL “lost” W5 books. During the convention the roster was unsecured. Nobody knows how many duly elected delegates there were for different candidates bc of all the manipulation underway. But when did you ever care about the truth? pic.twitter.com/9SsrLSjnm5
— Yiscah Bracha (@yiscahbracha) August 21, 2025
Thursday, the state DFL not only vacated the endorsement, but put the Minneapolis unit on probation for two years:
“After a thoughtful and transparent review of the challenges, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee found substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19th, including an acknowledgement that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention. As a result, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee has vacated the mayoral endorsement.
Seems pretty clear-cut, right?
Well, maybe. Maybe not.
The Fateh and the DSA crowd are, predictably, very unhappy with the decision:
28 party insiders met privately and voted to overturn our endorsement.
— Omar Fateh (@OmarFatehMN) August 21, 2025
Let me be clear, we’re still in this fight. And we’re going to win.
Donate and sign up for a shift today. https://t.co/5zwecGZb71 pic.twitter.com/g2SVhwlm6i
And this, perhaps, is where this becomes a barometer of the problems facing the Democrats today.
It's not like Fateh is that much further out to the progressive left than the mainstream of the Minnesota DFL - the party that spent the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions turning an $18 billion surplus into a $6 billion deficit, after raising taxes and hiking the state budget 40% in two years, plus jamming down abortion on demand through nine months, repealing "born alive" rules, institutionalizing the transing of children, giving drivers licenses, free tuition and healthcare to illegal aliens, setting up a Covid snitchline and a "woke" thoughtcrime database, and turning the state into one of the most fraud-prone states in the country.
The state's party chair, Richard Carlbom, who took over after longtime godfather Ken Martin took over, is the architect of the drive that got same-sex marriage enshrined in the Minnesota Constitution.
So "radical" is hardly the problem.
But "too radical"?
Candidates like Fateh, not to mention Mamdani, AOC, Bernie, and the entire Squad, are about as unpopular as Covid restrictions outside hard-blue cities - and, ironically, as venerated as Covid restrictions in Blue country.
The Minnesota DFL has a long tradition of stepping in, using the money and power of the state party to make sure the crazies that do the endorsing don't get too much power: the party stepped in in 2018 when convention activists nominated an actual communist, Matt Pelikan, for attorney general, getting the (believe it or not) more moderate Keith Ellison jammed down in the. primary. That same year, the radical (by 2018 standards) legislators Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade were knocking on the door of the nomination for governor, the party stepped in and got the "more moderate" Tim Walz endorsed (by adding Peggy Flanagan, who was at the time the most left-of-center representative in the State House) onto the ticket as Lieutenant Governor.
So an already radical state party is looking at its biggest city going full bore Marxist...
...just as the Democrat brand nationwide is starting to get that "past its shelf life" smell...
OH MY GOSH!
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) August 20, 2025
According to the NYT, democrats are facing a voter registration CRISIS.
Democrats lost ground in ALL 30 of the states that track voter registration by party.
Pennsylvania
2020: +🟦517,310
2025: +🟦53,303
YES, voter registration DOES make a difference!
🦇 pic.twitter.com/lJcnbmig9G
...leading up to a mid-term that should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for Democrats.
Minnesota, for all its reputation as a "blue state", is on the razor's edge, yet again; the Minnesota House is tied at 67-67; the DFL has a one-vote lead in the Senate, 34-33. Governor Walz won with a comfortable margin facing a weak candidate in 2022, but Keith Ellison barely squeaked past his re-election, and Minnesota's four "red" Congressional districts are getting redder every year, even as some traditional Democrat constituencies are getting softer.
So, this Minneapolis Mayor's race? It's gonna be...
...interesting.
