Omar Fateh, the socialist state senator dubbed the “Mamdani of Minneapolis,” will not follow his New York City comrade into power, having lost to the city’s incumbent mayor, liberal Jacob Frey.
Frey jumped to a 10-point lead over Fateh on Tuesday night but did not garner 50 percent of the vote, triggering a second round of vote counting under Minneapolis’s ranked-choice voting system. Frey emerged from that round with 50.03 percent of the vote to Fateh’s 44.37 percent.
Fateh’s loss denies the Democratic Party’s socialist flank a sweep in the two high-profile mayoral races they targeted. Minneapolis socialists hoped to replicate Mamdani’s rise with a Midwestern twist. Instead, Fateh’s loss underscores the limits of the hard left’s appeal, even in deep blue cities like Minneapolis.
An avowed socialist born in Northern Virginia—where he launched an unsuccessful campaign for Fairfax County school board before moving to Minneapolis—Fateh ran to the left of the already progressive Frey. He vowed to ensure that events like Minnesota’s annual “Trans Equity Summit” would receive public funding from the city and attacked Frey for underfunding the event. He also promised to implement the sunny-sounding “Minneapolis 2040 Plan,” which would have enshrined explicitly race-based housing laws by prioritizing “outreach to local developers and businesses owned by people of color, indigenous people, and women, in the administration and development of City-funded housing projects.”
That platform made Fateh the darling of the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s activist wing, which voted to endorse him over Frey earlier this summer, only for the state party to revoke its endorsement, citing “substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process.” One Frey supporter, Minneapolis city councilwoman Linea Palmisano (D.), openly accused Fateh of “cheating.”
It wasn’t the first time Fateh faced such accusations. As a state senator in 2022, Fateh faced an ethics committee investigation over his ties to a campaign volunteer who was convicted of perjury in a federal election fraud case. Fateh said he had “no relationship” with the volunteer, Muse Mohamud Mohamed, who turned out to be his brother-in-law.
Frey has taken his own maximalist stances on issues like Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 restrictions enforcement. But he took heat from Fateh’s supporters for opposing Mamdani-esque policies like rent control and for dismantling a homeless encampment that stood for nearly a year in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood.
Fateh acknowledged his loss in a Wednesday post on X, saying, “I’ll keep fighting alongside you to build the city we deserve. Onward.”
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