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The 2017 Minneapolis mayoral election was held on November 7, 2017, to elect the Mayor of Minneapolis. This was the third mayoral election in the city's history to use ranked-choice voting. Municipal elections in Minnesota are nonpartisan, although candidates were able to identify with a political party on the ballot.
Minneapolis is the county seat of Hennepin County and the larger of the Twin Cities, the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the United States. As of 2017, Minneapolis is the largest city in the state of Minnesota and 45th-largest in the United States, with an estimated population of 422,331. The Twin Cities metropolitan area consists of Minneapolis, its neighbor Saint Paul, and suburbs which altogether contain about 3.6 million people, and is the third-largest economic center in the Midwest.
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) or Ranked choice voting (RCV) is a type of ranked preferential voting method used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates. Instead of indicating support for only one candidate, voters in IRV elections can rank the candidates in order of preference. Ballots are initially counted for each voter's top choice. If a candidate has more than half of the vote based on first-choices, that candidate wins. If not, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The voters who selected the defeated candidate as a first choice then have their votes added to the totals of their next choice. This process continues until a candidate has more than half of the votes. When the field is reduced to two, it has become an "instant runoff" that allows a comparison of the top two candidates head-to-head.
Minnesota is a state in the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and northern regions of the United States. Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state on May 11, 1858, created from the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory. The state has a large number of lakes, and is known by the slogan the "Land of 10,000 Lakes". Its official motto is L'Étoile du Nord.
No candidate achieved a majority in the first round of ballot counting on election night. Jacob Frey was declared the winner the next day after several rounds of vote tabulations.
Jacob Frey is the mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota. A member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he was elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 2013, representing the Third Ward.
Betsy Hodges was elected mayor of Minneapolis on November 5, 2013, out of a field of 35 candidates, with her term beginning on January 2, 2014. In response to the large candidate field, the Minneapolis Charter Commission approved a referendum increasing the filing fee from $20 to $500. [1] The proposal was approved by voters on November 4, 2014. [2]
Elizabeth A. "Betsy" Hodges is an American politician who served as the 47th mayor of Minneapolis. A member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, she represented Ward 13 on the Minneapolis City Council from January 2006 until January 2014. Hodges was reelected to the city council in the 2009 Minneapolis municipal elections.
In a blog letter dated November 7, 2016, a housing activist and longtime Minneapolis resident known as Captain Jack Sparrow announced his candidacy for mayor in the 2017 election; this was his third election campaign for office in the past 6 years. [3] Nekima Levy-Pounds, an attorney, civil rights activist, and former president of the Minneapolis NAACP, was one of the first candidates to begin their campaign, with an announcement on November 14, 2016. Hodges announced her re-election campaign on December 15, 2016. City Council member Jacob Frey and filmmaker Aswar Rahman entered in early January, while State Representative Raymond Dehn and theatre executive Tom Hoch announced their campaigns in February. [4] [5] [6] David John Wilson, an active member of the Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, entered the race during the candidate filing period in August 2017, but he declined to identify by party affiliation in favor of the stated principle "Rainbows Butterflies Unicorns". [7] Ian Simpson ran under the platform of the Idea Party, which asks the citizens of Minneapolis to pitch in their own creative solutions for change. [8] [9]
Nekima Valdez Levy-Pounds is an American lawyer, professor, activist, minister and writer. She served as president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP from 2015–2016. She also serves on and has founded a variety of organizations that focus on issues of racial equality and disparity in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as a bi-racial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey.
Aswar Rahman is an American filmmaker, UX designer, and 2017 Minneapolis mayoral candidate. Rahman is the founder of Cineapolis and its annual film festival, the Mespies.
Formal candidate filing began on August 1, 2017. Political parties held caucuses and conventions in the spring and summer, deciding whether to endorse a candidate for election. The DFL did not endorse a Minneapolis mayoral candidate at its July 2017 convention. [10]
On October 27, the Star Tribune editorial staff endorsed Jacob Frey for mayor. [11] This was followed by an endorsement of Frey by the Minnesota Daily on October 30. [12]
The Star Tribune is the largest newspaper in Minnesota. It originated as the Minneapolis Tribune in 1867 and the competing Minneapolis Daily Star in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s Minneapolis's competing newspapers were consolidated, with the Tribune published in the morning and the Star in the evening. They merged in 1982, creating the Star Tribune. After a tumultuous period in which the newspaper was sold and re-sold and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009, it was purchased by local businessman Glen Taylor in 2014.
The Minnesota Daily is the campus newspaper of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, published Monday and Thursday while school is in session, and published weekly on Wednesdays during summer sessions. Published since 1900, the paper is currently the largest student-run and student-written newspaper in the United States and the fourth-largest paper in the state of Minnesota, behind the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Daily was named best daily college newspaper in the United States in 2009 and 2010 by the Society of Professional Journalists. The paper is independent from the University, but receives $500,000 worth of student service fees funding.
Democratic-Farmer-Labor
Independent
Farmer Labor
Basic Income Guarantee
Socialist Workers Party
Libertarian
Rainbow, Butterflies, Unicorns
The Idea Party [8]
No candidate achieved a majority in the first round on election night. Several rounds of vote transfers were necessary to determine a winner, a process which did not start until the next day. [36]
Candidates whose total votes in all ranked positions are less than the highest votes in first rank are immediately eliminated. In 2017 five candidates remained for the sequential elimination process.
Candidate/Votes by rank | 1 | 2 | 3 | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|
Jacob Frey | 24.97% | 19.90% | 14.39% | 59.26% |
Tom Hoch | 19.27% | 18.67% | 13.22% | 51.16% |
Betsy Hodges (incumbent) | 18.08% | 16.57% | 21.57% | 56.22% |
Raymond Dehn | 17.34% | 16.51% | 14.04% | 47.89% |
Nekima Levy-Pounds | 15.06% | 17.43% | 16.31% | 48.80% |
Other or none | 5.28% | 10.92% | 20.47% |
With four rounds of elimination, Jacob Frey was announced as the winner on Wednesday, November 8, at 2 pm, 18 hours after the polls closed. [38]
Candidate | Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4 | Round 5 | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
votes (% of active) | transfer | votes (% of active) | transfer | votes (% of active) | transfer | votes (% of active) | transfer | votes (% of active) | ||||||
Jacob Frey (winner) | 26,116 | 25.0% | +634 | 26,750 | 26.3% | +2,730 | 29,480 | 29.5% | +9,888 | 39,368 | 42.1% | +7,348 | 46,716 | 57.2% |
Raymond Dehn | 18,101 | 17.3% | +473 | 18,574 | 18.2% | +5,454 | 24,028 | 24.1% | +3,330 | 27,358 | 29.2% | +7,613 | 34,971 | 42.8% |
Betsy Hodges (incumbent) | 18,915 | 18.1% | +552 | 19,467 | 19.1% | +4,044 | 23,511 | 23.6% | +3,364 | 26,875 | 28.7% | −26,875 | ||
Tom Hoch | 20,125 | 19.3% | +787 | 20,912 | 20.5% | +1,842 | 22,754 | 22.8% | −22,754 | |||||
Nekima Levy-Pounds | 15,716 | 15.0% | +473 | 16,189 | 15.9% | −16,189 | ||||||||
Charlie Gers | 1,233 | 1.2% | −1,233 | |||||||||||
Aswar Rahman | 756 | 0.7% | −756 | |||||||||||
Al Flowers | 711 | 0.7% | −711 | |||||||||||
L.A. Nik | 612 | 0.6% | −612 | |||||||||||
David Rosenfeld | 477 | 0.5% | −477 | |||||||||||
Captain Jack Sparrow | 438 | 0.4% | −438 | |||||||||||
Gregg A. Iverson | 335 | 0.3% | −335 | |||||||||||
Ronald Lischeid | 325 | 0.3% | −325 | |||||||||||
David John Wilson | 220 | 0.2% | −220 | |||||||||||
Troy Benjegerdes | 184 | 0.2% | −184 | |||||||||||
Undeclared Write-ins | 138 | 0.1% | −138 | |||||||||||
Ian Simpson | 119 | 0.1% | −119 | |||||||||||
Christopher Robin Zimmerman | 1 | 0.0% | −1 | |||||||||||
Theron Preston Washington | 0 | 0.0% | 0 | |||||||||||
Active Ballots (% of Valid) | 104,522 | 100% | 101,892 | 97.5% | 99,773 | 95.5% | 93,601 | 89.6% | 81,687 | 78.2% | ||||
Exhausted Ballots (% of Valid) | 0 | 0.0% | +2,630 | 2,630 | 2.5% | +2,119 | 4,749 | 4.5% | +6,172 | 10,921 | 10.4% | +11,914 | 22,835 | 21.8% |
Total Valid Ballots | 104,522 | 104,522 | 104,522 | 104,522 | 104,522 |
Source: Minneapolis Elections & Voter Services [40]
The 2010 Minnesota gubernatorial election was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2010 to elect the 40th Governor of the U.S. state of Minnesota for a four-year term to begin in January 2011. The general election was contested by the major party candidates State Representative Tom Emmer (R–Delano), former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton (DFL), and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner. After a very close race, Dayton was elected governor. Emmer would be elected to the United States House of Representatives four years later.
Gary Schiff is an American politician and activist who represented Ward 9 on the Minneapolis City Council. A member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), he was first elected in 2001 and re-elected in 2005 and 2009. Prior to his political career, Schiff was involved with a variety of activist groups and causes ranging from human rights with the Human Rights Campaign, to historic preservation with Save Our Shubert.
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John M. Quincy is an American politician and marketing consultant living in Minneapolis. From 2010–2018, he served two terms on the Minneapolis City Council as a representative of the city's 11th Ward. Quincy moved to Minneapolis in 1994 and sought the endorsement of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 2006 for a seat on the Minneapolis Board of Education which he did not receive. He won both the DFL's endorsement and the 2009 City Council election and served as the head of several committees. He has also acted as a member of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport's Noise Oversight Committee.
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