Minnesota’s Democratic Party Revokes Endorsement of Mayoral Candidate

It was a rare triumph for the democratic socialist candidate seeking to unseat the mayor of Minneapolis.

After a chaotic party convention held last month, State Sen. Omar Fateh clinched the endorsement of the local Democratic Party, becoming the first mayoral candidate in the city to get that support since 2009.

But the edge was short-lived. On Thursday, Democratic Party officials in Minnesota took the rare step of withdrawing the Minneapolis chapter’s endorsement, citing “substantial failures” during the convention, which was marred by technological and procedural irregularities.

The decision was a blow to Mr. Fateh’s candidacy, which has drawn national attention because of comparisons to the mayoral race that has electrified New Yorkers.

Like Zohran Mamdani, who won New York’s Democratic primary in an upset in June, Mr. Fateh is a young state legislator seeking to steer his city to the left by taxing the rich to build affordable housing, putting caps on rent increases and overhauling how public safety resources are spent. Both men are democratic socialists, Muslim and have African roots.

Mr. Fateh, 35, is challenging Mayor Jacob Frey, a two-term incumbent who has raised significantly more money. The endorsement of Mr. Fateh stood to make party resources and valuable voter databases available to his campaign.

Graham Faulkner, a co-manager of the Fateh campaign, criticized the decision to revoke the endorsement.

“Our campaign sees this for what it is: disenfranchisement of thousands of Minneapolis caucusgoers and the delegates who represented all of us on convention day,” Mr. Faulkner said in a statement. “The establishment is threatened by our message.”

Mr. Frey, 44, a centrist Democrat who ran the city during the turbulent aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, had filed a complaint challenging the fairness of the local convention of the Democratic Party, known in Minnesota as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

“I am proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes, and I am glad that this inaccurate and obviously flawed process was set aside,” Mr. Frey said in a statement.

There is no primary in the Minneapolis mayoral race, which means that party conventions in the city, which leans heavily Democratic, can be decisive for candidates who secure the party’s endorsement. The city’s mayoral election, which will take place in November, is nonpartisan.

In Minneapolis, conventions tend to draw ardent backers of candidates who cast ballots during multiple rounds of votes, as a pool of candidates gets winnowed down. To secure the party endorsement, a candidate must get at least 60 percent of the vote.

In a statement posted online Thursday afternoon, state Democratic Party officials said that a series of serious lapses had preceded Mr. Fateh’s endorsement. The first involved a meltdown of an online voting system that resulted in a “substantial undercount” in the first balloting.

That undercount unfairly disqualified a third candidate, DeWayne Davis, from advancing to an additional round, according to the party’s review. The review found other lapses. Among them: A registration check-in sheet was not properly secured, “resulting in the opportunity to replace, delete or alter ballot ID numbers.”

The report did not find that any campaign had acted improperly.

In the end, Mr. Fateh prevailed in a vote conducted late at night through a show of badges on the Minneapolis chapter’s convention floor, rather than in a traditional balloting.

On Thursday, state party officials took the unusual step of placing the city’s Democratic Party on probation for two years. The city’s Democratic Party has organized several conventions in recent years that resulted in disputed outcomes. Some have ended in violence.

John Maraist, the chair of the Minneapolis Democratic Party, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon.