As New York goes, so goes Minneapolis
Or is it the other way around?
I’ve never thought to compare those two places before, although they’re both cities. Climate, demographics, location, history, style – all are very very different. But in terms of mayoral races, they sound surprisingly similar, as Bill Glahn points out:
Minneapolis voters (who are 80-90% Democrats) face a Hobson’s choice next month at the ballot box. They could opt for the gradual (though accelerating) decline offered by two-term incumbent Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey. Or they could take the offer of a quick coup de grâce from sitting state Sen. Omar Fateh, another Democrat. …
For reasons I am unable to fathom, the city’s newspaper, The Star Tribune, is out today with its umpteenth puff piece on the youngish (age 35) state senator. …
Reporter Deena Winter writes,
“Over the past five years, the democratic socialist has gone from political unknown to standard bearer for Minneapolis’ ascendant progressive coalition, harnessing disaffection with more moderate Democrats — and with the political process itself — to rack up a series of electoral and legislative wins.”
In his thirties? Check. Democratic socialist? Check. Previously unknown? Check. Suddenly winning? Check. Third-world connections? Check (Fateh is of Somali ethnicity). Muslim? Check.
Fateh has more allegations of fraud than Mamdani, but their policies certainly sound similar:
Fateh says that he will fight Donald Trump on immigration enforcement. On housing, Fateh will begin with rent control and transition to the abolition of private property.
On policing, there will be none. …
He vows to raise many taxes (local income tax, carbon fees, vacancy tax, a “land-value” tax). But the problem here is that you have to tax something, some object (property value, sales, income, wealth, people), of which there soon will be nothing. …
… [O]nce Fateh takes office, the existing cash in the city’s treasury will soon vanish through fraud and scams. His ability to raise new revenue will be stymied by a lack of anything taxable to latch onto. He will then be left pleading for a county/state/federal bailout.
Come to think of it, he sounds even worse than Mamdani, due to possibly more corruption and fraud (see this for allegations against Fateh of voting fraud in initially winning the Democrat nomination for mayor, which was later withdrawn).
And Fateh’s opponent Frey – who was mayor during the Floyd riots and COVID – is not all that dissimilar to Cuomo, although a bit more energetic and considerably younger (44).
Frey is the current mayor of Minneapolis, running for a third term. He’s also Jewish, which makes for a stark contrast with Fateh (Frey also reminds me a bit of Chicago’s ex-mayor, Rham Emanuel, in that not only are they both Jewish but they both have – of all things – a ballet background; Emanuel as a dancer himself and Frey being the child of two professional ballet dancers).
There is no Sliwa figure in Minneapolis, but there are many candidates and the race will be decided by ranked-choice voting. And so we have this situation:
Looking to the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral race, Minnesota Sen. Omar Fateh, Rev. DeWayne Davis and Jazz Hampton have formed a pact to lobby for each other’s second- and third-place votes. Schultz says together they are using ranked-choice voting in an effort to block Mayor Jacob Frey from reelection.
So I think regular polls mean even less than usual there, because of this type of voting. But for what it’s worth, Frey leads in the most recent poll, but both candidates are way below 50% and the poll doesn’t seem to deal with the reality of the ranked-choice situation.
NOTE: Speaking of Mamdani, I watched this video by Ben Shapiro about the NYC race, and in it he said a fascinating thing: that a recent poll revealed that, among foreign-born New Yorkers, Mamdani leads Cuomo 62% to 24%, but among American-born New Yorkers, it’s 40% Cuomo, 32% Mamdani, and 25% Sliwa. It’s worth listening to his remarks on Mamdani in general, and the most recent debate in particular.
I have been visiting Minneapolis (downtown) for many years, and am actually here as I type this, and the city has changed considerably over those years. For the 1st time I do not feel safe downtown even during the day, or safe taking the light rail. Thursday night upon leaving a downtown restaurant our group (myself and 4 female friends) was accosted by an aggressive black man demanding that we allow him to join our party, stating his intentions with my female companions in NO uncertain terms. When we rebuffed him (in a more polite manner than he deserved) he accused us of racism. Fortunately our ride showed up that moment.
Many of the buildings looked partially or fully unoccupied, and the streets had an ominous feel to them. The next day, as we drove through the postcard-perfect, Midwestern suburbs, I thought of all of the liberal residents and how they vote. They may not like what is happening in their city, but I am certain that they will continue to vote for the politicians and policies that create this decay.
I know its sounds bad, but I think its good if Fateh and Mamdani both win. The country needs hard, stark examples of what the current incarnation of the Democratic party brings. I’m afraid the residents of Minneapolis and NYC will never learn, but maybe the rest of the country will as those cities fall into the abyss.
I agree with physicsguy (4:18 pm) in principle, and probably more than only in principle. My sole reservation is that in that eventuality, crime will be even more rampant — dare I suggest even more indulged and/or excused? — should Fateh and Mamdani win, and that in turn will imply even more homicides (for example). I don’t want more homicides.
In some large percentage of homicides, the victims are black, and Black Lives Matter.
Well, don’t they??
physicsguy; M J R:
I disagree. I think the ratchet usually goes in one direction these days. Many people will suffer, most likely to no avail.
Frey, like so many elected officials in Minnesota, is a carpet-bagger. Born in Virginia, moved to Minneapolis in 2009, ran for office in 2010 and been working his way through the cursus honorum ever since. They just parachute these guys in.
For example, Senator Tina Smith from New Mexico, moved to Minnesota in the 80s and went into politics. Her seat was previously held by Al Franken, a New Yorker, who replaced Norm Coleman, another New Yorker. He got the seat warmed for him by Dean Barkely, a Minnesotan who held it for a year due to the untimely death of Paul Wellstone, from Washington DC…
So we’re getting these Muslims groomed up out of nowhere now, but that’s not really very different from where Frey and his ilk are coming from. Some political machine has decided to change its favored source for empty suits.
The long game, as I see it, doesn’t hinge upon who wins in NYC or Minneapolis. Those are battles in a longer war. (Though I wish things were otherwise for NYC and Minneapolis.)
In the long game it looks to me like we are winning, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be setbacks.
After Reagan won in 1980, Republicans held the White House for another 12 years.
After Trump won in 2024 Republicans look even stronger and Democrats much weaker. J.D. Vance has a great shot as POTUS for eight years after Trump. That’s twelve years of a Republican president.
I doubt we can maintain both houses of Congress for all that time. There will be setbacks, of course. However, that’s a lot of time to keep the Democrats at bay and Make America Great Again.
Eyes on the prize.
So we’re getting these Muslims groomed up out of nowhere now, but that’s not really very different from where Frey and his ilk are coming from. Some political machine has decided to change its favored source for empty suits.
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And you all vote for them anyway. Ilhan Omar represents a white majority district and was able to retain her seat by defeating an ADOS black lawyer (with a wife and children) who ran as a common-and-garden Democrat.
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A few years back, I took an inventory of the Minneapolis city council. One was a town planner by trade, one owned his own business. The rest were people whose employment history had been dominated by work for minor NGOs. Most of them did not have any children and two were either males cosplaying women or women cosplaying men (I could not tell).
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What’s happened is that serious people with other things to do with their life have given up on public office and left it to these clots. That’s who runs, and the electorate shows little capacity to identify and vote for people who aren’t idiots.
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(Notable about Frey is that he has a wife and child and had a law practice before running for office. His predecessor Betsy Hodges had no children and an employment history which resembled that of the clot crew on the city council. But, hey, she actually grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, so there’s that).
@Art Deco:And you all vote for them anyway.
Who’s “you”, kemosabe? I’ve never lived in Minnesota, nor voted there.
When did Somalis first start settling in Minneapolis
I had been thinking that Somis were brought to Minneapolis by the Obama administration. But after a little searching I found that Somalis began settling in Minneapolis in the early 1990s. They were first scattered around the U.S. but started moving to the Minneapolis area to be around other Somalis and available jobs.
BUT in 2016, Obama brought in
84,995 refugees. Not all to Minneapolis.
Over 70 percent are from five countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Burma, Iraq, and Somalia.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2016/10/262776.htm
I think Omar is going to be much worse, in effect, than Mamdani. Mamdani is a version of Obama: Brown-skinned minority group affiliation, intelligent, well-educated, well-spoken. He has been well trained in managing his public-facing persona, and he is accustomed to moving in liberal, upper class settings. He has limited practical experience in politics, and is being advanced well beyond any practical benefit it might provide – but he’s seen enough to know how the machine works, and has been coached in how it will benefit him. He will do as instructed, at least at first.
Omar, on the other hand – he’s a Somalian. All of the horrific stories of Somalian money laundering fraud, all of the cash extraction stories, the pillaging of public institutions – are examples of a problem that is actually much worse than the stories. They are experts at exploiting systems without any scruples; the scale of the fraud buggers accurate accounting. The taxpayers of Minneapolis are in for quite a wild ride, and a result that nobody – nobody will ever get to the bottom of, I fear.
Thirty years ago, give or take, the science fiction dystopia subgenre depicted cities (and entire countries) that looked like those described by Telemachus and others.
Back then, the authors felt it was necessary to precede their story with some major disaster, sometimes even a nuclear war.
Nobody had a plot where the inhabitants voted themselves into the situation.
Gotham City in one (all?) of the Batman origin stories looks a lot like that too, but I don’t remember what the back-stories are.
@ Neo > “I think the ratchet usually goes in one direction these days.”
Not just in these days.
I used to wonder why the Old Testament stories often (not quite always; see Jonah’s mission to Nineveh) ended with God destroying some society or country (including Israel) down to the bare ground.
I’m beginning to understand.
At some point, the ratchet has pulled the strings of moral character so far in the wrong direction that there is no longer any hope for the children (if there are any!) to even begin to learn righteousness, because there are no examples and no support for virtuous behavior.
Gaza under Hamas is a case in point, in the exact same geographical area as back then, but we are now seeing the same trajectory all around the world.
And it’s not all caused by Muslims, although they are a big part of it in the West. Other cities and states have “leaders” doing the same thing who have no formal affiliation with Islam genetically or ideologically
However, the Muslim politicians under discussion wouldn’t be here, nor the Muslims supporting them, in the numbers sufficient to cause the ominous decline we see in NYC and Minneapolis (and elsewhere), if they hadn’t been deliberately imported by the non-Muslims already there.
I agree somewhat with physicsguy and MJR: ” The country needs hard, stark examples of what the current incarnation of the Democratic party brings.”
On the other hand, I would think that Portland, Chicago, LA etc. would be hard and stark enough, but there is none so blind as he who will not see.
As a conservative, I support public order. Demoncrats don’t. In Chicago two thugs had a gun battle on the street in the middle of the afternoon. The Soros-backed States Attorney declined to prosecute them, because it was “mutual combat”.
@neo: I think the ratchet usually goes in one direction these days.
neo et al.:
If the ratchet only goes one way, how did Trump get elected?
These days? We are living through one of the most amazing periods of change in American history.
It’s not a revolution, but a swing back away from leftist revolution the Democrats have implemented all too successfully.
Victor Davis Hanson calls it a counter-reformation which I’m sure is technically accurate, though a bit confusing.
It seems conservatives won’t take yes for an answer.
@ huxley > “If the ratchet only goes one way, how did Trump get elected?”
The ratchets can be local (contained in a single location) or global (more wide-spread). So far the US has only had local ratchets getting out of hand.
(Really global would be when ALL the ratcheted locations merge into a single glob.
World Economic Order and all that.)
Places where the ratcheting has been reversed have had some sort of intervention element, where the electorate experienced a shift in voting preferences due to the action of the contesting parties. We can do that because of our political system, so long as it isn’t being monkeyed with too much.
Part of the ratcheting includes monkeying with the electoral system.
Once a particular city gets ratcheted the wrong way* past a certain point, it is not recoverable.
That point may be nebulous and hard to identify, and it may be further down than feared (see Giuliani turning around NYC). But it’s hard to see how electing Zohran “Defund the police and end prosecutions” Mamdani ” will make this situation any better:
https://nypost.com/2025/10/22/business/an-armed-gang-of-shoplifters-is-terrorizing-nyc-supermarkets-and-grocers-say-nypd-is-ignoring-the-rampage/
Comments look like a clone of our thread:
*I initially wrote “ratcheted the wrong way,” but realized we never speak of a political or social ratchet working in the conservative direction, only in the libero-anarchic-socialist direction. I suspect that is because the process by which an effective ratchet works uses methods that are anathema to the Right, but beloved of the Left (paging Saul Alinsky, but he has forerunners and colleagues).
Speaking of monkeying with elections, it isn’t all done with voting procedures and machines.
https://nypost.com/2025/10/24/business/wealthy-whales-may-be-manipulating-elections-thanks-to-prediction-market-technology/
@ Niketas > “So we’re getting these Muslims groomed up out of nowhere now”
Stop the presses!
https://nypost.com/2025/10/25/us-news/how-antisemitic-activist-linda-sarsour-mentored-socialist-zohran-mamdanis-nyc-mayoral-bid/
Who’s “you”, kemosabe? I’ve never lived in Minnesota, nor voted there.
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No, you just say things like:
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“So we’re getting these Muslims groomed up out of nowhere now, but that’s not really very different from where Frey and his ilk are coming from. Some political machine has decided to change its favored source for empty suits.”
@Art Deco:No, you just say things like: ““So we’re getting these Muslims…”
We Americans, in different places, including the two cities of New York and Minneapolis in different states, referenced in the title of the post at the top of the page, are getting Muslim politicians groomed up from nowhere to run as Democrats. But our other politicians running as Democrats also frequently have been groomed up from nowhere for quite a few years now, and I had Minnesota examples at hand, it being one of the places explicitly mentioned in the post I am commenting on.
Sorry for any confusion, hope that clears things up. I don’t live or vote in New York either, I suppose I should add, and so should not be blamed for how New Yorkers have been voting either.
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I live in NYC. NYC currently has a foreign born population of 37%
We have an historically LOW murder rate of 4% that would put us in the bottom 1/3 of all states.
It is only 1/4 that of some red states
Minneapolis? Has a murder rate about equal to some Red STATES.
Oh a troll.
Waiting for ranging fire.
Comparing the crime rate of a city to the crime of a state is already bogus. Big cities in red states contain the lion’s share of their crime, and are nearly all Democrat dominated, as well as disproportionately populated by the Most Diverse Demographic of all which is by itself responsible for most murders.
Assuming that 2024 is reported honestly, which is increasingly a big if, NYC has the number #67 violent crime rate, one below Spokane, WA and one above Fayetteville, NC.
Top 5 are Memphis, Oakland, Detroit, Little Rock, Baltimore. Only two of those are in “red states” and all disproportionately populated by America’s Most Diverse Demographic.
Next 5 are Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, St Louis, Dayton OH. More red states now, but still cities with a disproportionate share of America’s Most Diverse Demographic.
Deep-blue cities in deep-blue states Minneapolis #15, Tacoma #20, Seattle #46, well above NYC. Even Salt Lake City is #36: the days when it was mostly Mormon and well-behaved are well behind us.
Deena Winter use to write for the Nebraska Examiner. Leftist.
I spent lots of time in the Twin Cities in college and I can tell you that the people of Minneapolis consider themselves to be a better version of the Big Apple. They called themselves the Mini Apple.
With the Floyd riots, the Twin Cities were already on the eve of destruction. If Frey loses, it’s Katie bar the door. And those Leftists deserve it.
One large skyscraper in Minneapolis (IDS Tower?) recently sold for a shocking low price.
I was at the Dakota music venue in downtown Mpls and I went to a Twins game one or two years ago. Downtown was vacant.
The libs will never learn until things get critically bad.
And Power Line has done a great job reporting the fraud and theft of state money by the Somalis. State government did nothing. The feds had to file the criminal cases.
It is really criminal what the Left has done to the Twin Cities.
Some welcome news…from Argentina…and hopefully an augur of sanity elsewhere…
“Milei’s Mandate Marches On In Decisive Midterms Win For His Party”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/mileis-chainsaw-austerity-big-beautiful-bailout-line-key-midterm-test
Gosh, did I say “sanity”?????
‘James Carville Wants “Walk Of Shame For Collaborators” Once Trump Leaves Office’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/james-carville-wants-walk-shame-collaborators-once-trump-leaves-office
(Looks like I spoke too soon…. Well, I often do…)
+ Bonus (of the Bonehead variety…) in the form of a rhetorical question…
“Down The ‘Racist’ Rabbit Hole – Why Are So Many Arrested Minorities Booked As ‘White’?”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/down-racist-rabbit-hole-why-are-so-many-arrested-minorities-booked-white
Oh, and [French] “Socialists” gotta do what [French] “Socialists” gotta do….
“French Socialists Pitch Scaled-Down Wealth Tax Bill As Offer To Save Lecornu, Macron, Avert Elections”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/french-socialists-pitch-scaled-down-wealth-tax-bill-offer-save-lecornu-macron-avert
…which COULD, in fact, be very much related to the Milei post above…well, with a bit of creativity…(or should that be “creative destruction”??)…
Minneapolis is a long way from the Mary Tyler Moore show.
Minnesota Nice really means Minnesota Naive.
They think everyone is just like them.