Current state Sen. Omar Fateh (DFL-Minneapolis) appears to have won the Democratic-party endorsement for Mayor of Minneapolis last night at the city’s party convention for 2025.
I say “appears” because that’s the word used the Minnesota Star Tribune in their headline,
Minneapolis DFL convention appears to endorse democratic socialist Fateh for mayor over Frey
After 12 hours or so of conventioneering at the Target Center yesterday (Saturday), the whole thing came down to a show of hands among the few remaining attendees before time ran out on their facility rental.
To quote Woody Allen from Bananas (1971), the whole thing was “a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
The first round of mayoral voting was done using an electronic method. It took hours, rather than seconds, to count the vote, which produced no clear winner. A switch to paper ballots was floated at one point for round 2, before the last-second “show of hands” method delivered “victory” to Fateh.
You can read the blow-by-blow account from the Star Tribune. The one point I would make is that no one seems to draw the connection between the abject inability of Democrats to run a meeting and their demonstrated inability to run a city, state, or nation.
Both Fateh and two-time incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey will appear on the November ballot, along with a bunch of other candidates, in a ranked-choice-voting contest. The party “endorsement” doesn’t get Fateh much of anything in that context, where most candidates will still be running as Democrats. The Star Tribune points out that, at the 2021 convention, a different Democratic Socialist candidate captured a majority of DFL delegate votes, only for Frey to get re-elected in November, anyway.
Going into Saturday’s Democratic convention, Fateh already held the position of apparent frontrunner. Fateh had already locked up the endorsement of the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists, which may prove to be the more important one in today’s Minneapolis.
My friend from Power Line Scott Johnson sums up Sen. Fateh’s appeal,
Fateh is like New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. He owns Mamdani’s odious views, but without the personal charisma. Fateh is the man Minneapolis needs — the man Minneapolis needs to keep it in the course of decline and make the decline irreversible.
I’ve been following the career of Sen. Fateh for the past 3 1/2 years, with his involvement in the Feeding Our Future scandal, election irregularities, ethics complaints, etc/
That’s the dilemma now facing the rest of Minnesota. In the normal course of things, a state’s largest city serves at the economic engine and cultural center for the rest of the population.
In the past 75 years or so, we’ve witnessed the growing phenomenon of the opposite. With Michigan and Detroit, Maryland and Baltimore, and perhaps now with Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, states are having to manage the decline and fall of their biggest urban centers while protecting the rest of the territory from the pathologies leaking out.
Detroit, MI, was the wealthiest city per capita, in America, back in the 1950’s, now it’s a smoking ruin with just 1/3 of the peak population still hanging around.
In 1950, Detroit was America’s 5th largest city by population, after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Baltimore was 6th.
Today, Detroit ranks 26th and Baltimore 30th.
But, somehow, the rest of Michigan has soldiered on, perhaps even thriving, but well short of their mid-century national dominance.
If elected mayor in November, Fateh will be backed by a majority socialist city council. They are determined to raise taxes, defund the police, and drive people and businesses out of the city.
While all of that may benefit surrounding suburbs in the very short run. the resurgent crime and dwindling economic output will pose long-term management challenges for the rest of the state.
The good news is that Minneapolis matters less and less to the rest of the state. Like Detroit, the population of Minneapolis peaked in 1950, when it represented 17 percent (about 1/6) of the state. Today, Minneapolis is just 7 percent of Minnesota (1/14).
As the Scottish economist Adam Smith once said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. There’s about to be a lot more.