Mamdani is a legitimately A+ retail political talent, whereas Fateh struggles to complete sentences.
There was big news this week out of Minneapolis, and as history tells us, “big news” from the Twin Cities is rarely good news. Incumbent DFL mayor Jacob Frey — running for his third and final term in office — was denied his party’s endorsement at the Minneapolis DFL convention, in favor of activist state Senator Omar Fateh. (In Minnesota the Democratic party is known as the Democratic-Farm Labor party for historical reasons dating back to mid-20th century politics.) The result, predictably, has been madness. But not quite as much madness as you might think.
The parallels between Fateh’s surprise triumph over Frey (amidst immense procedural confusion and claims of hijinks) and Andrew Cuomo’s humiliation in the New York City mayoral primary last month are beguilingly obvious, and indeed, there is a transparent spiritual connection between the two. The activists who attended this goat rodeo to secure Fateh the DFL endorsement were clearly inspired by the example of Mamdani’s zeitgeist-altering victory.
Yet the differences are just as clear as well. First and most importantly, because many seem to be confused: This was not a vote. This was an endorsement. Both candidates will be on the ballot in November, both running as DFL candidates. And I would caution against overreacting to Jacob Frey’s failure to secure an endorsement he also failed to secure during his winning campaigns in 2017 and 2021. (The Minneapolis DFL, as you might imagine, is teeming with insane purity-obsessed progressive fanatics. They are a tough crowd to please. The difference this time around is that the conventioneers actually endorsed someone else as a candidate.) Fateh has a chance of becoming Minneapolis’s next mayor — he has certainly scored a publicity coup — but less than you might realize. He sits in a very different strategic position than Zohran Mamdani does heading into November.
The parallels must be addressed first, however. For one thing, while Mamdani and Fateh have somewhat different life backgrounds — Fateh, the son of Somali immigrants, was born in Washington, D.C. — they both hail from the same ideological background: Both are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and both are broadly and proudly on the extreme wing of the far left in American politics today. Both are running on similar socialist platforms (albeit contoured to their cities): rent stabilization, police “reform,” and raising taxes on “the wealthy.” Both have similarly rancid views on Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas.
Both are young political entryists: Fateh, in a move that speaks volumes, admits that he only relocated from Northern Virginia — where he once ran for school board, winning 2 percent of the vote — to Minneapolis because his relatives told him it was “fertile ground for politicians,” given its large Somali immigrant population. Once there, he immediately began running for office, losing a 2018 local race before successfully primarying incumbent DFL state Senator Jeff Hayden in 2020 and taking his seat in 2021. He is clearly a man in a hurry.
And why not? The progressive iron will never be hotter, after all, so best to strike now. The activist energy within the hard left quarters of the Democratic Party is off-the-charts in urban areas at the present moment. (Amusingly, Chicago is a notable exception to this trend, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.) After having seen Mamdani’s shock victory over the living embodiment of everything socialists loathe about the mainstream left, these people saw their opportunity to stage a coup and humiliate the incumbent in the best possible venue for such revolt: During a clownshoes convention.
But do not forget that it was only that: a humiliation. This was a symbolic victory for Fateh, and its true value derives from its spin. It was not a vote. Furthermore, the activists who scored this coup for Fateh did so because they were outraged by things like Frey’s refusal to defund the police or his condemnation of extremist anti-Zionist events. Even in deep blue Minneapolis, neither of those is a winning issue — which is why coverage of Fateh’s DFL endorsement has emphasized the economic planks of his candidacy, to the extent the media have done much research on this subject at all.
Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani won a vote, and he is now the official Democratic nominee for mayor — may God help the Big Apple. Furthermore, while Mamdani’s currently sports only a plurality among voters in a self-defeatingly divided race, his support is manifestly higher across New York City than Fateh’s is in Minneapolis — not the least reason being that Mamdani is a legitimately A+ retail political talent, whereas Fateh struggles to complete sentences in every interview of his I’ve yet seen. The temptation in the media right now will be to blow Fateh up into the next big progressive giant-slayer, and that may yet come true. But I have my doubts. I have a sneaking suspicion that, come November, we will be marking the third and final election of Jacob Frey as mayor.