“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” The line is apocryphally attributed to Josef Stalin. Still, its fundamental truth persists, and it’s been making the rounds in Minneapolis, where today, the city could elect a mayor that most voters didn’t pick.
On paper, the two-term incumbent Jacob Frey should be cruising to victory. A pragmatic liberal with movie star good looks and a Minnesota “nice” demeanor, Frey has led the city through the most tumultuous years since the 1960s, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 set off racial and political unrest and triggered a police exodus. In the months that followed, violent crime surged: homicides doubled, carjackings tripled, and emergency response times grew. Frey faced fury from progressives demanding the abolition of the police and residents pleading for order. Five years later, Frey’s still standing, with a record most mayors would envy. Violent crime has fallen for three straight years since peaking in 2021—homicides down 20 percent, gun violence down almost 50 percent. As Paul Glastris and I reported earlier this year, his administration passed one of the nation’s most ambitious and effective housing reforms, removing height limits for apartments near transit corridors. Minneapolis rents remain roughly 15 percent below the national average, even as its population grows. Things are finally improving in a city that’s been through hell, and Frey’s policies are part of the reason. Not surprisingly, he leads every poll, has a considerable edge in fundraising, and his campaign is projecting confidence in the press.
And yet there’s a decent chance Frey will lose.
The reason is ranked-choice voting and how Frey’s opponents can game it. Under this system, which the city adopted in 2006, voters rank up to three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets 50 percent, the last-place candidate is knocked out, and voters who ranked that candidate first have their vote counted for their next choice. That keeps happening until somebody crawls over 50, or until only one candidate remains.
This year, three of Frey’s rivals—state senator Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist; Jazz Hampton, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur; and DeWayne Davis, a pastor—have quietly joined forces: don’t attack one another, appear together when possible, and urge voters not to rank Frey. In 2021, this coordinated attack propelled a Democratic Socialist City Council candidate from third place in the first round to victory. It can happen again; this time for mayor. Neither the Frey nor Fateh campaigns responded to my questions about whether they are preparing potential legal challenges to the outcome.
Fifteen candidates are technically running, but everyone knows it’s three against one. “We’ve seen two-person alliances before,” Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota, which helped champion ranked-choice, told The Minnesota Star Tribune. “What’s new this year is an explicit slate of three.”
The alliance is more mathematical than philosophical. “They want you to think that Fateh, a socialist and Davis, a pro-business liberal, and Hampton, kind of between the two, are all interchangeable,” wrote Carol Becker, editor of the Minneapolis Times and former Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation member, referring to the progressive group backing Frey’s challengers. A recent email from the group, Minneapolis for the Many, blared, “Fateh, Davis, and Hampton Extend Lead Over Frey!” The fine print: their own polling had Frey at 34 percent of first-choice votes, Fateh at 29, Davis at 10, and Hampton at 5. Only by adding the three challengers together do they get to “we’re winning.”
A City Still Living in the Aftermath
The conditions for this alliance were set five years ago, when Floyd’s murder and the spike in violent crime that followed upended the city’s political order. At a protest in June 2020, protesters yelled, “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” when the mayor would not, on the spot, commit to abolishing the police department. Days later, most of the City Council stood on a park stage and pledged to “defund the police.” Voters joined the mayor in rejecting that vision at the ballot in 2021, and most councilmembers who pledged to defund lost their seats. But the hangover remains: every race in this blue city is still, on some level, about whether Minneapolis wants to return to 2020 or keep moving forward.
Frey, 44, who ran from the left in 2017, checked the worst impulses of the city council. He wanted to reform the police department, not abolish it. He cleared homeless encampments. He repeatedly said that the city needed more cops, not fewer. The city of half a million residents has slowly rebuilt its depleted police ranks while diversifying its force. Minneapolis still has one of the lowest police staffing per capita in the country, roughly 600 officers. Chicago has 12,000 officers, and its population is not 20 times that of Minneapolis.
Frey’s critics on the left argue he’s too close to developers and too quick to clear homeless encampments. But his allies say he’s done what progressive mayors often fail to do—cap crime and housing costs.
Omar Fateh, 35, a democratic socialist first elected to the state senate in 2020, invites comparison to New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. Both Muslim statehouse members are Democratic Socialists of America acolytes running social media-geared campaigns in majority-Democratic cities.
Fateh, like Mamdani, once ran on dismantling the police department, but has softened his tone, calling instead for “real violence prevention” and shifting some 911 calls to mental health responders. The Somali American is the only major candidate to support rent control and “safe outdoor spaces” that would legalize homeless encampments.
Fateh has Mamdani’s platform, but not his polish. “Andrew Cuomo is gonna say a lot of things tomorrow night on the debate stage,” Mamdani quipped recently on Fox News ahead of his final debate, “and frankly, I wish it was more like NASCAR so New Yorkers could see the billionaires sponsoring him right on his suit jacket.” That’s a brilliant Mamdani line, pointed and instantly shareable. Fateh never has ripostes like that.
At one debate, Fateh said Minneapolis police should arrest ICE officers and federal agents carrying out Trump’s deportation orders. Frey asked how local cops would go after feds with “bigger guns.” Pressed to clarify, Fateh stumbled through a line about Frey not being willing to do as much because the same people “[bankrolling] Donald Trump’s campaign have been bankrolling [Frey’s] campaign as well.” The mayor snapped back with the sternness of a dad catching a fib: “That’s not answering the question.” The moment epitomized the contrast between the two men: Frey sharp and quick on his feet, Fateh earnest but improvising—and willing to propose something that, if taken seriously, would trigger a dangerous standoff between local and federal law enforcement.
Fateh also has baggage. In 2022, his brother-in-law and campaign volunteer pleaded guilty to submitting fraudulent absentee-ballot requests. Fateh denied knowing him to colleagues and the press, then admitted the close connection. Although a federal probe spared Fateh, the episode cost him credibility even among progressives. Another Minnesota Reformer report raised questions about Fateh introducing legislation to award a $500,000 state grant to Somali TV of Minnesota, an online news outlet, after it aired ads in 2020 that encouraged viewers to vote for him. None of this has stopped Fateh from collecting endorsements from nationally known progressives, such as U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and others who draw their party’s ire.
Policy differences between Frey and Fateh and the latter’s ethical lapses would typically dominate the race. Instead, under ranked-choice voting, they’ve been overshadowed. Each of the three candidates challenging Frey avoids disagreements that might alienate the others’ supporters. Debates blur into parallel stump speeches.
Democracy, I guess
Hampton, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, is arguably closest to Frey on policing, much more so than Fateh—he jokes that “we both run the West Coast offense; I’d just implement it better.” Davis, a pastor and former congressional staffer, wants a “comprehensive approach” modeled on Baltimore’s community-violence prevention programs. What any of these positions mean is really anyone’s guess.
The current dynamic demonstrates how ranked-choice voting can be manipulated: three candidates with conflicting positions and some with ethics problems effectively running on a ticket against a mayor who, by any conventional measure, has a successful record and remains the most popular candidate.
If Frey wins, it will be a triumph for pragmatic liberal governance in a city still haunted by its George Floyd-era crime spike. But if ranked-choice voting pushes a second- or third-place candidate into first, Minneapolis could wake up Wednesday with a mayor-elect supported by a minority of voters. That wouldn’t be fraud. But it would prove that even well-intentioned reforms can distort democracy—by blurring the differences voters need to see. Minneapolitans may wish for a simpler ballot and a sharper argument about their city’s future. Other cities may, too.
