Election Day 2023 Preview Part II
The Midwest
For Part I, covering the Northeast and the South, click here; for Part III, covering the Western US, click here.
Des Moines, IA
Mayor
Connie Boesen vs. Denver Foote vs. Josh Mandelbaum vs. Christopher William Von Arx
Conventional wisdom is that this is a contest between city councilmembers Connie Boesen and Josh Mandelbaum, and that it’s probably Boesen’s to lose. She’s the more moderate of the two, still distinctly a Democrat in the mainstream of the party, but less interested in shaking anything up or taking on a more activist role. Josh Mandelbaum, by contrast, has pushed the city to take environmental action, support reproductive rights in a post-Dobbs world, and build a more dense, walkable city. Mandelbaum has been the target of dark money-fueled attacks from Republicans in this campaign, but probably squandered his chance to capitalize on it by going on the attack himself against Boesen in a mailer accusing her of not supporting abortion rights that doesn’t seem to have gone over well. In addition, he’s been outspent badly, and outgoing mayor Frank Cownie endorsed Boesen last week, in what may have been the death blow to Mandelbaum’s campaign.
Former Bernie Sanders campaign worker Denver Foote is also in the election, but her campaign just never took off. We hope she runs for something else after this.
City Council At-Large
Carl Voss (i) vs. AJ Drew
Running for an at-large seat is a much tougher task than running for a district-based seat, and we just don’t think AJ Drew is up to it, given how little we can find about him online, not even a website. Carl Voss, a former newspaper photographer and a bit of a moderate, is probably winning reelection.
City Council Ward 1 (Northwest)
Rob Barron vs. Chris Coleman vs. Kathy Hellstern vs. Dennis McCullough vs. RJ Miller vs. Rose Marie Smith vs. Kimberley Strope-Boggus
Seven candidates have piled into this contest which will be decided today—that’s right, Des Moines has nonpartisan, single-round, first-past-the-post elections. The most progressive candidate with a shot at winning is Rob Barron, founder of the Latino Political Network. Barron wants to invest more in public transportation and public goods, and less in criminalizing poverty. He’s endorsed by most labor unions and the Des Moines Register, which also makes him a mild favorite. Former longtime city councilmember Chris Coleman has a lot of name recognition, but less in the way of other politicians willing to support him and his moderate campaign. He’s pitching himself as the candidate for voters who “don’t want to take a risk”. Media company owner Kathy Hellstern has put together an impressively substance-free campaign, and Dennis McCullough is a truck driver who kind of seems like a Republican, which might actually come in handy as far as vote consolidation goes. He just has to hope everyone else does about equally well.
The candidates who are unlikely to win are Rose Marie Smith, who isn’t running much of a campaign; Kimberley Strope-Boggus, who dropped out a few days ago during early voting; and RJ Miller, who has a history of domestic abuse.
City Council Ward 2 (Northeast)
Linda Westergaard (i) vs. Chelsea Lepley
Why and how did second term Councilmember Linda Westergaard suddenly lose the confidence of Des Moines’s Democratic establishment? It might be a general sense that she’s grown out of touch. Blocking hip hop acts from performing at a music festival isn’t the biggest problem, all things considered, but it does demonstrate a certain lack of awareness of the modern era. And she’s missing the performative “but I also support reform” lines centrists are supposed to add after they hug the police tightly in public statements. Regardless, an impressive array of state legislators, labor unions, and progressive groups are now backing Chelsea Lepley.
City Council District 4 (Southeast)
Joe Gatto (i) vs. Jason Benell vs. Justin Torres
Joe Gatto, a moderate running for his third term on the council, has a challenger to his right, Justin Torres, and to his left, Jason Benell. Unlike Westergaard, Gatto hasn’t made mainstream Democrats interested in looking elsewhere, and unlike Lepley, Benell hasn’t really collected the kind of broad party support that taking down an incumbent often requires. Still, he did manage to get the Des Moines Register endorsement, which is enough to keep him competitive.
Lansing, MI
City Council At-Large [Top 2]
Round 1: Tamera Carter 26.8% - Trini Lopez Pehlivanoglu 20.4% - Jody Washington 18.8% - Missy Lilje 10.0%
The first-round results in Lansing’s open at-large race suggest that bank manager and Chamber of Commerce-supported candidate Tamera Carter will be elected, and that candidate Missy Lilje would have trouble making second place, even if she hadn’t functionally dropped out months ago. That means this contest is probably between Trini Lopez Pehlivanoglu, who seems fine, and juvenile prison worker Jody Washington, who served on the council previously, during which time she earned a reputation as a conservative for fighting to close most of the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries and trying to end Lansing’s status as a sanctuary city.
Minnesota
Minneapolis City Council
Ward 1 (Northeast)
Elliot Payne (i) vs. Edwin Fruit [SWP]
In addition to Robin Wonsley in District 2, who has no opposition, the other more or less guaranteed win for the progressives will be Elliott Payne, who shares the ballot only with a candidate from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
Ward 3 (Downtown)
Michael Rainville (i) vs. Marcus Mills [Ind/Green]
Michael Rainville is a staunch moderate on the Council. Unlike most of his companions, he doesn't represent the suburbanish periphery of the city, but its densely built-up downtown. The reason downtown elects moderates is because, much like Chicago or New York, Minneapolis is a city where many with wealth will choose to live in the urban core instead of a far-flung suburb. Minneapolis's downtown in particular is booming like few others. As Rainville claims on his website, there are 5,460 new residents in the neighborhood since his last election in 2021—an astounding figure given that each ward only has around 33,000 residents. This influx of new residents (and, presumably, high churn of existing residents) makes incumbents acutely vulnerable on paper, but Rainville's deft political instincts and propensity for taking credit for downtown's boom has served him well. It also has to help that progressives never landed a strong recruit here and have mostly focused their attention elsewhere this cycle.
Nonprofit director Marcus Mills wasn't the progressive recruit, but after Rainville won the DFL's endorsement outright, that recruit dropped, leaving Mills the only progressive alternative. Mills has been massively outspent and struggled to build progressive support, to the point he's partnered with the Green Party.
Ward 4 (Camden)
LaTrisha Vetaw (i) vs. Marvina Haynes vs. Angela Williams [GOP] vs. Leslie Davis [Ind]
LaTrisha Vetaw, a member of Jacob Frey’s moderate faction who has lately mulled a primary challenge to Ilhan Omar, is a safe bet for reelection against Republican Angela Williams and perennial candidate Leslie Davis. Activist Marvina Haynes has, understandably, been occupied with challenging her brother’s controversial 2004 murder conviction; he has consistently maintained his innocence, and was recently granted a new evidentiary hearing to present his case next month after the Innocence Project took up his case earlier this year, citing affidavits from witnesses recanting their testimony, a suspect identification process so flawed a detective on the case questioned its legality and accuracy before a cancer diagnosis took him off the case, and an absence of physical evidence.
Ward 5 (Near North)
Jeremiah Ellison (i) vs. Victor Martinez vs. Philip "OMac" Peterson
Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota AG and former congressman Keith Ellison, is not as progressive as the DSA bloc of councilors, but when push comes to shove he generally sides with the progressives over the moderates. His main opponent, Victor Martinez, is a right-wing anti-abortion pastor who prevented the DFL from endorsing anyone by doing so much fraud at the endorsing convention that they gave up, and who is the subject of a restraining order due to a wave of harassment he directed at the Minneapolis DFL chair. The police union and other pro-police PACs are supporting him, because of course they are, they support every alternative to a progressive candidate. In a surprise, however, he proved a bridge too far for the Minneapolis Star/Tribune, who threw up their hands and refused to make an endorsement in light of his anti-abortion and anti-trans public statements and previous vote for Donald Trump. Yes, that's how bad it has to get before the Trib will decide not to endorse against a councilor who's only barely part of the progressive wing. Martinez then responded with a letter to the editor calling their non-endorsement "religious discrimination.”
Ward 6 (Phillips and Central)
Jamal Osman (i) vs. Kayseh Magan vs. Tiger Worku vs Guy Gaskim [GOP]
Ward 6 is, by far, the messiest contest in the city. Incumbent Jamal Osman is the one real swing vote on the Council, and while that worked to his advantage by helping him avoid factional battles in the highly contentious 2021 elections, his lack of close allies is a liability now that he’s facing his first major scandal. In late 2022, posts from his old Facebook account surfaced. In them Osman spews vile homophobia (gay marriage will cause the end times, according to one of them) and antisemitism (repeatedly holding Israel’s actions against all Jews, and at one point asking “Where’s Hitler when you need him?”). Osman apologized, and that apology seems to have gone over well, especially in terms of the pantheon of post-Hitler-praising recoveries. Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, released a statement saying “I forgive him, and trust he has learned from this”, and City Council president Andrea Jenkins, a board member of the Human Rights Campaign, had more mixed public opinions on the matter, but didn’t outright call for his resignation. Meanwhile, Osman is dodging questions about his wife’s nonprofit, which the state of Minnesota is trying to forcibly shut down because it believes it to be a fundamentally fraudulent shell formed to siphon off government funds intended for children in poverty.
The list of who’s still supporting Osman is both longer than you would expect and often seemingly random. It includes the AFL-CIO, one of the most moderate city councilors (Lisa Goodman) as well as one of the most progressive (Jason Chavez), Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, state AG Keith Ellison—the man who is currently suing his wife’s nonprofit because he believes it’s primarily a vehicle for fraud—and several others.
Moderates seeking to elect a member more uniformly willing to vote their way have gotten behind prosecutor Kayseh Magan, who has not shied away from attacking the incumbent. Magan is leaning hard on his Star Tribune endorsement to establish himself as the “clean” alternative, an easier path to victory than running on his opposition to rent control, for instance. The other Osman opponent is Tiger Worku, who you may remember from a viral moment when he brought a soup can to a BLM protest to mock Trump’s recent comments warning of soup-can-wielding antifa marksmen. Worku’s initially promising campaign crashed against the rocks of a DFL convention delegate scandal where he, or at least someone on his campaign, clearly got dozens of people to sign up as delegates to the nominating convention without telling them what they were signing up for.
Ward 7 (Calhoun-Isles and Central)
Katie Cashman vs. Ken Foxworth vs. Scott Graham
On a macro level, there are 5 districts where progressives are favored (1, 2, 5, 9, and 10), 5 districts where moderates are favored (3, 4, 6, 11, and 13), and 3 districts that are probably going to decide who controls the Council. Ward 7 is the first of those, and probably the toughest of those for the progressives. Moderate longtime incumbent Lisa Goodman is finally retiring, and her chosen successor, realtor and property manager Scott Graham, seems a lot less safe than you would expect from the district. He failed to hit the necessary 60% in the DFL nomination convention to get the party endorsement, and he’s clearly been shaken by the revelation that his property management company racked up 209 violations (later revealed to be 290) with the city—so shaken, in fact, that he’s added a very defensive attempt to explain them away to the front page of his website.
Another reason Graham might be sweating is that his opponent is nonprofit worker Katie Cashman, his junior by 30 years, a very energetic campaigner, and doing a great job of threading the ideological needle of this affluent, moderate district. Cashman, though clearly affiliated with the progressives, is no socialist, and has made herself very difficult to attack with the one line of attack moderates in Minneapolis know how to do at this point (defunding). She would probably be a frustrating 7th vote on the Council, but she’d be a great value over replacement in this district.
Ward 8 (Powderhorn)
Andrea Jenkins (i) vs. Soren Stevenson vs. Terry White vs. Bob Sullentrop [GOP]
Somehow, riots and accusations of fraud may not have been the biggest surprise of the DFL endorsement convention. A challenger won the endorsement over an incumbent councilmember—and not just any councilmember, but City Council President Andrea Jenkins. Jenkins was perceived as in between the progressive and moderate factions in her first term, but after the moderates took back several seats in 2021, she immediately sided with them, and they elected her to lead the council. In an especially galling move, she helped Mayor Jacob Frey sustain his veto on rent control—a measure she nominally supports—by holding the veto override vote on Eid al-Adha, a Muslim Holy Day, so that three pro-rent control votes would be absent.
Jenkins’s main opponent, and the official DFL-endorsed candidate, is Soren Stevenson, an activist who lost an eye to police violence while attending a BLM protest after George Floyd was killed. Stevenson, a white man, is running against a Black, trans woman, and doing so on the issue of racial justice, a peculiarity that hasn’t been lost on either candidate.
Ward 9 (Longfellow and Phillips)
Jason Chavez (i) vs. Daniel Orban [Ind]
Jason Chavez is the third and final progressive incumbent who managed to avoid any serious challengers. Even the Star Tribune remarked that, given his support from DSA, the DFL, and organized labor, running against him with no support, as computer scientist Daniel Orban is doing, comes across as "quixotic." They still endorsed him, naturally, because anyone who wants to hire more police and bulldoze over homeless encampments is a friend to them, but Orban's campaign is still dead in the water, barring a city-wide anti-progressive wave that pushes in even vaguely strange candidates who write about the presence of "apocalyptic horsemen" necessitating "pro-human philosophy" on their website.
Ward 10 (Uptown)
Aisha Chughtai (i) vs. Nasri Warsame vs. Bruce Dachis vs. Greg Kline [Ind]
Aisha Chughtai was probably already favored for reelection as a progressive running in a progressive district without any major controversies, and all that coming off her initial election in 2021 where she won by almost 20%. But the election ended fully at the DFL nominating convention when her main opponent, moderate Nasri Warsame, started a riot to prevent her from winning the nomination. The DFL rescheduled the convention and banned him from attending. The media firestorm was worse for Warsame than losing the endorsement, but that wasn’t even the only PR disaster for him in the summer—the man invited a Somali warlord to speak at his fundraiser. Moderates, including the Star-Tribune and former Ilhan Omar challenger Don Samuels, made a late game decision to switch horses to Bruce Dachis, who is running a single-issue crime-focused campaign. We have no idea which of them is going to come in second, but the obvious problem for whoever it is will be the total lack of anti-progressive consolidation attempts will hamstring everyone but Chughtai during the ranked-choice tallying, if it even gets that far.
Ward 11 (Nokomis and Southwest)
Emily Koski (i) vs. Gabrielle Prosser [SWP]
Emily Koski unseated progressive Jeremy Schroeder two years ago in this affluent, relatively moderate part of the city. The daughter of former mayor Al Hofstede and the niece of former councilor Dianne Hofstede, Koski might seem like an inviting target for progressives: a political nepo baby who took down one of their own. But the moderate councilor didn’t draw a serious challenge, as progressives decided to prioritize other opportunities, like the two open seats and Andrea Jenkins’s more progressive-friendly ward.
Ward 12 (Longfellow and Nokomis)
Aurin Chowdhury vs. Nancy Ford vs. Luther Ranheim
So this is kind of funny: Minneapolis centrists thought they had Aurin Chowdhury right where they wanted her when they found old tweets from during the height of the George Floyd protests calling for the abolition of the Minneapolis Police Department. Then it turned out her leading moderate opponent, philanthropic adviser Luther Ranheim, had liked a tweet calling for Minneapolis to “[b]urn this department to the ground and rake the ashes.” Oops! That hasn’t stopped the Star-Tribune from running with it, but it’s certainly made it ring hollow to accept Ranheim’s claims of changed beliefs and fat thumbs while looking askance at Chowdhury’s explanation of her views evolving somewhat from how she felt during the most fraught time period Minneapolis has experienced in the modern era. Chowdhury, a political staffer and public policy expert, has the DFL and DSA endorsements, the support of most of organized labor, and the backing of outgoing incumbent Andrew Johnson, something of a swing vote on the current council. Ranheim’s got Frey and the Star-Tribune, but he likely needs a fair bit more than that to beat Chowdhury. Also in the race is Nancy Ford, a conservative independent who ran against Johnson in 2021 and got 30% by virtue of being the only candidate to his right; she’s likely to be a nonfactor this time around, unless she somehow outlasts Ranheim in ranked-choice voting.
Ward 13 (Southwest)
Linea Palmisano (i) vs. Zach Metzger vs. Kate Mortenson vs. Bob "Again" Carney [GOP]
Council Vice President Linea Palmisano represents Minneapolis’s most suburban and conservative ward, situated in the city’s southwest corner along the border with Edina. It makes sense that she’s one of the most conservative councilors, and, sadly, it also makes sense that she’s coasting to another term with almost-nominal opposition from gadfly Zach Metzger, Republican Bob Carney, and Kate Mortenson, whose platform is moderate like Palmisano’s—more cops, more on-street parking, no rent control. Mortenson was, however, rightly disgusted with how Palmisano and Jenkins killed rent control—by holding a vote on a motion to table the rent control ordinance on Eid al-Adha, when the city’s three Muslim councilors would be absent from the council to observe Islam’s holiest day. Two of those councilors, Osman and Chughtai, co-authored the ordinance, and the third, Ellison, was a supporter. It’s a scummy thing to do and a straightforward instance of religious discrimination; it’s a genuine shame that Palmisano’s career isn’t just as endangered as Jenkins’s.
Saint Paul City Council
Ward 1 (Central)
Anika Bowie vs. Yan Chen vs. Travis Helkamp vs. James Lo vs. Lucky Rosenbloom vs. Omar Syed vs. Suz Woehrle vs. Jeff Zeitler
Don’t let the massive candidate list fool you—this is a race between three candidates: political organizer Anika Bowie, high school counselor James Lo, and cafe owner Omar Syed. Bowie is clearly the progressive of the bunch—she ran in 2019 and came within 6% of unseating incumbent Dai Thao and she’s reassembling the same labor-grassroots coalition as before. Without an incumbent in the race, her odds look good, but she has some strong opponents. Lo and Sayed both have deep ties to communities that have established themselves as forces in Saint Paul politics, Hmong and Somalis, respectively, and are outspending Bowie. Their policy outlooks are also similar—not anti-tax, but still pro-police. The devil is going to be in the ranked-choice details for this one.
Ward 2 (South-central)
Rebecca Noecker (i) vs. Peter Butler vs. Bill Hosko vs. Noval Noir
Rebecca Noecker is a less outspoken member of the progressive council majority, and the first of three candidates running for reelection in Saint Paul. The most serious of her three opponents is Bill Hosko, a borderline perennial candidate who spends most of his campaign time complaining about taxes, so she should feel good about today.
Ward 3 (Southwest)
Troy Barksdale vs. Patricia Hartmann vs. Saura Jost vs. Isaac Russell
Civil engineer Saura Jost carries the official DFL endorsement in this contest, and is the progressive choice. That doesn't necessarily make her the frontrunner. Instead she's locked in a heated battle with public policy director Isaac Russell. Russell has assembled the traditional moderate team: the Minneapolis Star Tribune, building trades unions, the Chamber of Commerce, and a lot of money. The other two candidates, Troy Barksdale and Patricia Hartmann, are both more similar to Russell than to Jost, so keep that in mind when working out how the IRV allocation will go.
Ward 4 (Northwest)
Mitra Jalali (i) vs. Robert Bushard
Mitra Jalali is the unofficial leader of the Council’s progressive wing—outspoken, intelligent, and about to get reelected. When your only challenger is some libertarian who’s also going around telling the press he’s “pretty certain” he’s going to lose, you can rest easy. It’s just kind of nice to write about a cool progressive who’s going to get reelected easily because people like her, especially after detailing the knife fights of Seattle and Minneapolis.
Ward 5 (North-central)
David Greenwood-Sanchez vs. HwaJeong Kim vs. Nate Nins vs. Pam Tollefson
HwaJeong Kim is the executive director of Minnesota Voice, and also the consensus candidate for Ward 5. Everyone from the DSA, to the DFL, to the AFL-CIO, to Melvin Carter, the moderate mayor of Saint Paul, supports her. We just want to highlight Pam Tollefson, because she put landlord testimonials on her website, and we think that’s funny.
Ward 6 (Northeast)
Nelsie Yang (i) vs. Gary Unger
Nelsie Yang is, like Jalali, a well-liked progressive facing weak opposition for reelection. However, retired engineer Gary Unger isn’t quite the nobody that Robert Bushard is. Unger was chair of the Ward 6 DFL, and comes across as a kindly old man and not a libertarian fringe candidate. If it weren’t for his advanced age and disinterest in negative campaigning, he might even have attracted the attention of the Chamber of Commerce or another centrist group.
Ward 7 (Southeast)
Alexander Bourne vs. Dino Guerin vs. Cheniqua Johnson vs. Foua-Choua Khang vs. Kartumu King vs. Pa Der Vang
In the same vein as Ward 1, Ward 7 has a crowded ballot but small field of candidates with a chance to win. It’s going to come down to either nonprofit manager Cheniqua Johnson or social worker Pa Der Vang. While neither would really be a member of the progressive wing of the council, It’s Johnson who sounds less nervous about making big changes to the city, which is good news, because she’s also the favorite, based on her DFL endorsement and financial advantage.