When the Minneapolis affiliate of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party met for its annual convention on July 19, chief among its agenda items was to decide whether or not to endorse a candidate in the upcoming Minneapolis mayoral election—something the Minneapolis DFL, which aligns itself with the Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee (DNC) on the national level, has not done since 2009. But to the surprise of many, a candidate for mayor received the 60 percent of the vote needed to secure the Minneapolis affiliate’s’s endorsement: second-term state senator Omar Fateh, who identifies as a democratic socialist.
Almost immediately following the unprecedented endorsement, Mayor Jacob Frey, the politically moderate second-term incumbent, challenged the results of the endorsement vote, citing an “extraordinarily high number of missing or uncounted votes” and flaws in the Minnesota DFL’s electronic voting system. Frey’s campaign claims another candidate, DeWayne Davis, was erroneously eliminated after the first round of voting, thus invalidating the second round, but Fateh told The Nation, “No matter what happened that day, the outcome would’ve been the same, and we would’ve ended with our endorsement.” Fateh’s supporters say that after the first round, Frey voters attempted unsuccessfully to break the established minimum number of delegates needed to conduct a vote by leaving the room. While it is unclear exactly how many delegates took part in the final vote, which was conducted by raising badges rather than paper vote tallies, Fateh received the clear majority of support among those remaining.
“It’s important to get out the narrative about what actually happened [at the DFL convention], which is that there was a clear majority in favor of Fateh,” says Revmira Beeby, a co-chair of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America. “Frey’s supporters saw that, and they tried to stage a walkout . . . . [They are] going to do whatever they can to delegitimize the democratic process, but ultimately, the way we overcome that is just by continuing to do the work, continuing to talk to people, continuing to mobilize people.”
On August 21, after conducting an investigation, the state-level Minnesota DFL rescinded the Minneapolis affiliate’s endorsement of Fateh, sparking criticism of the state party’s intervention in the local affiliate’s democratic process. Many convention attendees who supported Fateh claim that Frey’s accusations of vote discrepancies are disingenuous. A press release from Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America read, “Mayor Jacob Frey is directly copying from Donald Trump’s playbook—if you can’t win, subvert the democratic process.” With or without the Minneapolis DFL endorsement, Fateh will appear on the ballot in the city’s November 4 open election, which allows multiple candidates from the same party to run in a nonpartisan race.
Fateh is not the only insurgent leftwing candidate whose momentum at the city level has garnered backlash from the Democratic establishment. After Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblymember in Queens, garnered a surprise victory in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor in June, many high-level Democrats, including New York Governor Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, declined to endorse Mamdani in the general election against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams’s independent candidacies. But despite the rejection by his own party’s top brass, Mamdani’s commanding lead in the general election polling has progressives in other cities across the country asking how his success might be replicated elsewhere.
Local electoral strategy has been of particular importance to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a national political organization whose New York City chapter, of which Mamdani has been a member since 2017, played a significant role in his primary win. Fateh has been a registered member of the Twin Cities DSA since 2019. In July, Beeby told The Progressive that like Mamdani’s victory in the New York City primary, Fateh’s endorsement by the Minneapolis DFL represented a major triumph for his campaign. But Beeby was cautious, already anticipating the subsequent backlash from the party establishment.
The Twin Cities DSA chapter, Beeby says, has put significant time and effort into local elections. “We host regular doorknocks with Fateh, but also with our other endorsed candidates,” they explain, “including Aisha Chughtai, who represents Ward 10, and a park board candidate, Michael Wilson.” Twin Cities DSA, Beeby says, was active in also mobilizing Fateh supporters to voice their support at the Minneapolis DFL convention on June 19.
Although there is a lot of recent excitement about Fateh, Beeby says, the Twin Cities DSA chapter has long focused on campaigning for local candidates who they believe can collectively build a more just future for Minneapolis. In 2021, their endorsements and campaigning strategies helped elect local democratic socialists to the Minneapolis City Council, including Chughtai, Jason Chavez, and Robin Wonsley.
Wonsley, an independent socialist who represents Minneapolis’s second ward and has consistently pushed back against Mayor Frey’s agenda, notes that these electoral victories are the result of long-term efforts to build progressive institutional power. “The most important thing that I took away from Senator Omar Fateh’s DFL endorsement—that followed Zohran’s primary victory in New York—is that it didn’t happen overnight,” Wonsley tells The Progressive. “It took years of socialist organizations like DSA talking to their neighbors, talking to fellow union members, talking to relatives. And not only talking to them, but engaging them around concrete, material ideas.”
DSA’s involvement isn’t the only similarity between Mamdani’s and Fateh’s unexpected successes. Mamdani’s campaign took advantage of New York City’s ranked-choice voting system in the Democratic primary by forming an alliance with fellow mayoral candidate Brad Lander and urging voters to leave Cuomo and Adams off their ballots entirely. Fateh has similarly taken advantage of Minneapolis’s ranked-choice system, calling on Minneapolis residents to not rank Frey—a strategy used previously by Frey’s opponents in 2021. In his campaign platform, Fateh has emphasized goals that are similar to Mamdani’s, such as addressing the housing crisis through rent stabilization and increased affordable housing supply, and instituting policies to reform the Minneapolis Police Department.
Not everyone within Minnesota’s Democratic establishment is on board with Fateh’s vision. Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced in late July that he would endorse Frey. In March, Democratic U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar endorsed Frey as well.
As Wonsley points out, backlash from both conservatives and mainstream Democrats against leftwing candidates is nothing new. After Minneapolis became the focal point of nationwide protest following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, rightwing and centrist politicians mobilized to undermine the popular momentum for sustained change. In 2021, Yes 4 Minneapolis, an initiative to replace the MPD with a reimagined Department of Public Safety, was rejected by voters after concerted efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to delegitimize the movement. In years since, both Democrats and Republicans nationwide have engaged in fearmongering around “defund the police” messaging, which drew popular support in 2020.
But Wonsley doesn’t see the Yes 4 Minneapolis initiative’s loss as a failure. “I’m proud of Minneapolis,” she says. “Since the loss of the referendum, our fight for a transformed future and a mandate on policing in society hasn’t stopped.” While both parties have stoked fear and distanced themselves from proposals to transfer city budget funds away from police departments in favor of funding mental health care services and social services, some leftwing candidates have continued to embrace those initiatives. Mamdani has made his Department of Community Safety proposal, which would fully fund non-police crisis management services alongside investment in mental health care and homelessness services, a central pillar of his campaign platform. Similarly, Fateh has promised to implement the existing Safe and Thriving Communities Plan, which he says Frey has failed to do, as well as diverting the nearly 50 percent of 911 calls that don’t require police response.
“It’s really important to have candidates who are actually willing to stand by their beliefs,” Beeby explains. “People want candidates who are genuine and honest and who are going to fight for things without triangulating with the political establishment. That’s what people see in politics every day, and it’s why people are checked out of politics.”
Beeby also describes Wonsley’s trajectory as evidence that such tactics work. Wonsley campaigned in 2021 on shifting police budgets towards city services like access to housing and mental health support, and has since been re-elected to her seat. “When you’re a politician, you come to learn that there is actually no right way to frame a proposal that essentially challenges the status quo,” Wonsley says. “So much of organizing in the political space is tied to grassroots organizing. I [feel] solid as a socialist advocating against a genocide because I have the movement behind me. I still feel confident in critiquing our current policing operations . . . because the movement is still there.”
While the Minneapolis DFL endorsement may have been stripped from Fateh, his campaign remains confident that Minneapolis will elect Fateh in November. “This is exactly what Minneapolis voters are sick of,” Fateh said in a press conference just hours after the endorsement was stripped. “The insider games, the backroom decisions, and feeling like our voice doesn't matter in our own city.” Despite the backlash against him, Fateh could still win what will likely be a close race, in a city whose progressive movement is eager to build on all that seemed possible in 2020.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Robin Wonsley represents the second ward.