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MINNEAPOLIS’S OMAR FATEH ON HIS RUN FOR MAYOR  
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Liza Featherstone
September 22, 2025
Jacobin
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_ What does democratic socialism mean to Omar Fateh, Minneapolis
mayoral candidate? “It’s pretty clear cut: you want to take care
of everyone.” _

Minneapolis mayoral candidate State Senator Omar Fateh, Omar Fateh

 

Municipal socialism is an increasingly popular idea, and not only in
New York City, where Zohran Mamdani is favored to become mayor in
November. New polling in the Minneapolis race for mayor shows
democratic socialist challenger Omar Fateh gaining on the incumbent,
Jacob Frey, a centrist Democrat. A new poll shows Fateh only five
points behind Frey, up from thirteen points behind two weeks ago.
Interviewing Fateh late last week, it was easy to understand why the
thirty-five-year-old state senator is breaking through. He may not
win, but in a bleak, unstable time, his vision of socialism is hopeful
and grounded.

Asked what democratic socialism means to him, Fateh, whose first child
was born last month, had a straightforward answer. “It’s pretty
clear-cut,” he said. “You want to take care of everyone.”

He sees democratic socialism as a needed corrective to our political
system, which tends to be rigged for the elites. “Within the
Democratic Party,” he explained, “there are not enough voices for
working people.”

The Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party proved Fateh’s point
this summer. After Fateh won the party’s endorsement through its
usual process — which is not a primary, but rather a caucus and
convention, in which delegates vote on the nominees — the state
party withdrew their endorsement of him on a technicality, challenging
the legitimacy of the process under what many supporters of Fateh’s
campaign say was pressure from the incumbent mayor Jacob Frey’s
supporters and party donors. Representative Ilhan Omar and sixteen
other Minneapolis Farmer–Labor Democrats condemned
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state party’s move as “inexcusable” and said that it reflected
“blatant corruption” and the “influence of big money in our
politics.” Frey still has the support of establishment Democrats
like Governor Tim Walz and Senator Amy Klobuchar.

The son of Somali immigrants, Fateh says he grew up hearing his father
talk about the US Civil Rights Movement. But like many of his
generation, Fateh wasn’t engaged in politics until he was inspired
by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 bid for the presidency. He remembers
hearing the socialist senator and former mayor of Burlington, Vermont,
speak for the first time, and “not knowing what democratic socialism
was, but saying, hey, I identify with everything that he’s talking
about.”

Encouraged by a friend to attend a Democratic Socialists of America
meeting, he went. At the meeting, he recalls, there were some
disagreements among the members who favored getting involved in
electoral politics and those who did not, a debate that he notes is
still ongoing. But Fateh felt, then as now, that more unites than
divides socialists. “We debate the process” of how to build a
better world, he says, “but the vision is still the same.”

In 2020, the same year that Zohran Mamdani won his state assembly
seat, Fateh ran for state senate as a socialist and won. There, Fateh
has been a leader in the statewide push to democratize higher
education, winning tuition-free college for all students with
household incomes under $80,000. Because tuition is not the only
economic barrier for working class people pursuing higher education,
Fateh also pushed for and won stipends for childcare, transportation,
housing, and food, as well as grants for colleges to establish food
pantries for students as well as mental health support. For the first
time in over a decade, in a time of declining college attendance
nationwide, Minnesota has seen an increase in enrollment across all
its public institutions.

“We weren’t able to get everything we wanted,” Fateh says,
acknowledging that he had originally been fighting for universal free
tuition and that these gains are a compromise. “But we took a damn
good first step that we can build upon.”

In the city in which George Floyd was murdered by police in May 2020,
Fateh says there have been “no real meaningful changes, and there is
no plan for any meaningful, transformational public safety reform. Our
message has been very clear: We can have a public safety system that
works for everyone.”

Fateh is running not on police abolition, but on reforms similar
to those of Zohran Mamdani
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Both mayoral candidates argue that many of the 911 calls – Fateh
says nearly half in Minneapolis, citing a study by the city itself —
currently handled by police could be better and more humanely handled
by mental health responders. This way, he says, the police “can
focus on violent crime, and only violent crime, and that, as a result,
can make our city safer.” He also favors what he calls a “holistic
approach” to safety, which includes a stronger social safety net,
good jobs with good wages, affordable rent, and plenty of activities
for young people.

While most socialist campaigning occurs on the terrain of the
Democratic primary, part of the appeal of a general election is
bringing redistributive politics to the people who aren’t part of
the primary process: those who don’t vote often, aren’t registered
with a party or even voters who may have cast their ballot for Trump
last time.

“Last year, Trump won on a populist message,” Fateh observes.
“He ran on affordability, on people’s pockets hurting.” Like
Mamdani, who began his mayoral campaign talking with working-class
Trump voters
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Fateh argues that socialism can woo some workers away from the Right.
Minneapolis is a blue city, but Fateh recalls chatting with some Trump
supporters at a coffee shop early on in his campaign, one of them
wearing a red MAGA hat, and finding that many of their concerns were
just like those of other working people: corporate accountability,
affordability, and the challenges faced by small businesses. Fateh has
been talking about a commercial vacancy tax and other ways to ease
those challenges, wisely seeing that such moves can help erode the
MAGA base and improve the lives of people who depend on small-business
income.

As New York governor Kathy Hochul surprisingly acknowledged in her
recent endorsement of Mamdani, with Trump in office, cities urgently
need true fighters. Here again, socialists may be better able to
deliver.

“The Trump administration is going to make you choose between
upholding your values or losing funding,” Fateh acknowledges. The
moment will take special unity, he says, among “our partners, with
the county, and state, to make sure that the funding is there to meet
[the city’s] basic needs and services.” It will be especially
important, given Trump’s constant threats to defund cities, he says,
to make the rich pay their fair share.

Asked what he hopes to have accomplished by the time he leaves office
as mayor, Fateh doesn’t hesitate. He aspires to make Minneapolis
“a true union city” with “labor standards that meet the
moment,” a city in which the unhoused are housed, and getting the
services they need, including mental health care and addiction
treatment, a city in which young people have after-school activities,
summer jobs and schools in which they can thrive; an end to the
pollution and consequently high rates of asthma afflicting
working-class and poor communities; and a safer city, one in which
when a person calls 911 they get the response they need, and in time.

“All of that is possible,” says Fateh with a smile.

_Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance
journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart._

* Omar Fateh
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* Mayoral Race
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* Minneapolis
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* democratic socialist
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