State DFL strips Omar Fateh of party endorsement in Minneapolis mayoral race

In a shocking move, the Minnesota DFL Party vacated the Minneapolis DFL’s endorsement of Sen. Omar Fateh for mayor of the city. The move comes after Mayor Jacob Frey asked the state party to nullify the endorsement citing problems at the city’s convention.

Last month, the Minneapolis DFL held its endorsing convention to decide which candidates  would receive the party’s stamp of approval in the upcoming fall elections. While the party unit considered candidates for many different offices, the mayoral endorsement was considered the main event.

When the convention ended, Fateh claimed he was the winner of the mayoral endorsement after the second round of voting. However, Frey’s campaign subsequently asked the state DFL to nullify the endorsement due to problems at the convention.

The Frey campaign’s primary rationale for its request was the alleged failure of the convention’s electronic voting system. According to the campaign, the electronic voting system malfunctioned so badly that the system was later discarded by the convention.

On top of this, the Frey campaign said there were delegate access issues which included delegates and alternates being “inexplicably removed as delegates or downgraded before or at the DFL Convention.”

The mayor’s campaign asked for an expedited review of the matter. On Thursday, the state DFL officially vacated the Minneapolis DFL’s endorsement of Fateh.

“After a thoughtful and transparent review of the challenges, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee found substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19th, including an acknowledgement that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention,” said DFL Party Chairman Richard Carlbom.

“As a result, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee has vacated the mayoral endorsement,” added the chairman.

The state party’s findings and conclusion

Among other things, the state party found that the convention’s electronic voting system was “substantially flawed” and “produced a highly inaccurate tabulation of the first vote in the mayoral endorsement.”

Further, mayoral candidate DeWayne Davis was improperly dropped from the second round of voting despite achieving the necessary support to be on the second ballot. Since Davis was wrongly excluded from that round, the DFL ruled that the results from the second ballot were invalid.

The DFL also concluded that there were multiple delegate-related issues such as the failure to upgrade all alternate delegates, the loss of a credentials book, and the failure to secure the master credentials list which “was accessed by non-members of the credentials committee, including the campaigns.”

In addition to vacating the mayoral endorsement, the state DFL barred another endorsing convention from taking place. As such, no candidate may claim to be the DFL-endorsed candidate in the upcoming mayoral election.

The Minneapolis DFL was also placed on probation by the state party for two years during which they must comply with the directives of the state party and prove competency in adhering to party practices.

In response, a spokesperson for Frey’s campaign said the Fateh endorsement was “brazen cheating,” while Fateh alleged that the state party had engaged in the “disenfranchisement of thousands of Minneapolis caucus-goers.”

The 2025 Minneapolis mayoral election

At the moment, the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral election is viewed as a contest between Frey and Fateh. A former city councilor, Frey is serving his second term as mayor after winning the office in 2017 and 2021. Fateh is in his second term as a state senator.

Both candidates are decidedly left-wing, but Frey is viewed as more mainstream given his clashes with the far-left members of the Minneapolis City Council. Meanwhile, Fateh has drawn comparisons to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Like Mamdani, Fateh is Muslim and aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.

Frey has received endorsements from Gov. Tim Walz, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt. Meanwhile, Fateh has been endorsed by a collection of state legislators and city officials, including swing-district Sens. Judy Seeberger, DFL-Afton, and Aric Putnam, DFL-St. Cloud.

The election, which is conducted via ranked-choice voting, will take place on Nov. 4th. Early voting begins Sept. 19th and runs through Nov. 3rd.

The post State DFL strips Omar Fateh of party endorsement in Minneapolis mayoral race appeared first on Alpha News MN.