Our campaign has gotten a lot of hate from conservatives and MAGA partisans; they’re trying to say that we’re too radical or too far-left. But what they’re really saying is that our campaign is too friendly toward renters and workers, too close with immigrants and people that are just trying to make ends meet. When these extreme elements come after us, it means we’re doing something right. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. . . . We know that the right-wingers are going after us because they are scared of the working-class, multiracial coalition that’s being built in Minneapolis.
– Omar Fateh
Excerpted from “A Conversation with
Minneapolis Mayoral Candidate Omar Fateh”
The Nation
September 5, 2025
Excerpted from “A Conversation with
Minneapolis Mayoral Candidate Omar Fateh”
The Nation
September 5, 2025
I share this evening a number of pieces relating to Minnesota Senator Omar Fateh’s run for Minneapolis mayor. I’ll start by sharing what I posted on Facebook this past Saturday . . .
Of course, what I experienced on Saturday (and what I experience in the form of insulting comments whenever I write supportive comments in response to Omar’s social media posts) is nothing compared to the sickeningly racist and at times threatening comments that Omar receives on a daily basis. (For more about this “racist and factless meltdown” by the right over Omar and his campaign, see this previous Wild Reed post.)
The photograph of Omar I used on Facebook this past Saturday was one I took last Wednesday when Omar joined with fellow progressive mayoral candidates Jazz Hampton and Rev. DeWayne Davis for a “Rally for Change” at the Lake Harriet Bandshell in south Minneapolis. My friend and downstairs neighbor Joseph accompanied me to this event.
It was an event that served as both a kick-off to the start of early voting and the partnership of the campaigns of Omar, Jazz and DeWayne to win new leadership in Minneapolis City Hall.
So who is Omar Fateh? Following is how he introduces himself on his official “Omar for Minneapolis Mayor” website.
My name is Omar Fateh, and I currently serve as the Minnesota State Senator representing District 62, a seat I first won in 2020 and again in 2022. My terms in the Minnesota Legislature and my current mayoral campaign are the culmination of a life dedicated to improving the lives of my neighbors and fellow Minnesotans, informed by progressive values and strong community bonds.
I was born to immigrant parents from Somalia who instilled in me the values of a strong education, personal sacrifice, and community leadership. My early dedication to public service led me to pursue a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, where I engaged with at-risk youth, especially students of color, to connect them with greater educational opportunities.
My early service to Minneapolis included my role as a Community Specialist, where I worked to improve the City’s outreach to East African communities. I then became a project coordinator for the MN Department of Transportation, functioning as a liaison between the state and outside researchers investigating the impact of MNDOT projects on communities and the environment. I also served in the MN Department of Revenue. Throughout my career in public service I have also been employed at the University of Minnesota as a business analyst.
In 2020, I won state-level office and became the first Somali American and the first Muslim to serve in the Minnesota Senate. I authored 54 bills during the 2021-2022 legislative session, including a bill to exempt fentanyl test strips from classification as drug paraphernalia, which passed and has resulted in increased overdose prevention.
After winning reelection in 2022, I was appointed chair of the Higher Education Committee, and vice-chair of the Human Services Committee. My most notable achievements during this term have been a higher-education bill proposing free public college for students from households that make less than $80,000/year, and serving as chief author of a bill to secure a minimum wage and worker protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.
My career in public service is defined by my belief that community members are experts on their own needs, and leaders must listen to them when developing policy. I have deep ties in our community and have worked on issues such as environmental and racial justice through restorative urban planning, including reparations to Black neighborhoods destroyed by highways. I will continue fighting for these initiatives as Mayor to ensure that Minneapolis becomes an equitable and welcoming city for all of its residents.
And why Omar running for mayor? Here’s how he answered that question in a recent Star Tribune profile . . .
I’m running for Mayor of Minneapolis to work alongside our community to achieve the vibrant, loving city we know Minneapolis can be. We know that for working people, it’s getting harder to build our lives here. And with Donald Trump back in power, everything we’ve worked for is in jeopardy. It’s time to push back with forward-thinking leadership. Mayor Frey and the status quo are failing Minneapolis residents. We deserve leadership that makes it so people want to live here, raise families here, and start businesses here. Minneapolis is ready to invest in long-term solutions that will bring stability to our communities. We all want to invest in our shared success. We deserve an affordable city that is accountable to us.
In an interview with Peter Lucas in the September 5 issue of The Nation, Omar shared what he sees as the key issues facing the residents of Minneapolis.
Affordability is one of the main issues I hear about all the time. For me, addressing that starts with raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2028. It also means passing a rent stabilization policy, incentivizing new construction, and protecting tenants.
A lot of constituents have voiced their concerns about having a hostile federal government with Donald Trump in the executive and a Republican trifecta, with a Supreme Court that’s backing him. We need a mayor that’s going to stand up to protect all of our communities against the hostile federal government. We’ve always said, especially after the raid in our district, that MPD should never cooperate or collaborate with ICE. We deserve a mayor that will be honest and transparent and won’t run from issues relating to the federal government.
Another issue we’ve been campaigning on is public safety. We need to diversify our public safety response. A recent city report came out showing that nearly half of MPD calls actually don’t require an armed response, which tells us that we need to fund non-police programs like mental health responders, crisis teams, and youth programs. We need to fix the broken public safety system that our current mayor promised to reform after the murder of George Floyd. Our message is simple: When you call 911, everyone deserves an appropriate, timely response.
Yesterday, Omar and his campaign were featured in a Jacobin article by Lisa Featherstone. I share it below in its entirety.
Minneapolis’s Omar Fateh
on His Run for Mayor
By Liza Featherstone
Jacobin
September 22, 2025
What does democratic socialism mean to Omar Fateh, Minneapolis mayoral candidate? “It’s pretty clear cut: you want to take care of everyone.”
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 the 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. 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, 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
Jacobin
September 22, 2025
Jacobin
September 22, 2025
I conculde this post with the September 18 Wedge LIVE podcast’s “bike ride conversation” with Omar Fateh.
This 40-minute interview, hosted by John Edwards, is a novel yet serious deep-dive into Omar’s campaign for Minneapolis mayor.
Related Off-site Links:
Four Candidates for Minneapolis Mayor Weigh In on Major Issues Facing the City – Jon Collins (MPR News, September 19, 2025).
People “Are Tired of Backroom Decisions”: A Conversation with Minneapolis’s Omar Fateh – Peter Lucas (The Nation, September 5, 2025).
Omar Fateh Has All the Right Enemies – Alex Skopic (Current Affairs, September 5, 2025).
State DFL tries to disenfranchise the City DFL – David Tilsen (Southside Pride, September 3, 2025).
Minnesota Democrats Stab Omar Fateh in the Back – Concernicus (August 27, 2025).
DFL Reverses Omar Fateh Endorsement – Left Reckoning (August 26, 2025).
Democrats in Minnesota Revoke the Mayoral Endorsement of Omar Fateh – I Am Blakeley (August 23, 2025).
The State DFL Spits on the Minneapolis DFL – Steve Timmer (LeftMN, August 23, 2025).
Minnesota DFL Revokes Endorsement for Omar Fateh in Minneapolis Mayoral Race – Naasir Akailvi (KARE 11 News, August 21, 2025).
Rep. Ilhan Omar Condemns Party’s Decision to Throw Out Fateh Endorsement – Torey Van Oot (Axios, August 21, 2025).
How Did This Happen? – Ed Felien (Southside Pride, August 5, 2025).
Minnesota Democrats Endorse Socialist Omar Fateh for Mayor Over Incumbent Democrat Jacob Frey – AllSides (July 21, 2025).
Who Is Omar Fateh? Mamdani of Minneapolis Faces MAGA Abuse – Kate Plummer (Newsweek, July 15, 2025).
CAIR-Minnesota Condemns Anti-Muslim, Racist Hate Targeting Sen. Omar Fateh Amid Rising Political Violence – CAIR-Minnesota (July 15, 2025).
Minneapolis Gets Its Own Mamdani – Kayla Bartsch (National Review, July 15, 2025).
Minneapolis Mayoral Candidate Omar Fateh Faces Racist Trolling: “Go to Mogadishu” – Times of India (July 14, 2025).
Omar Fateh Will Work Across the Aisle If Elected Mayor – Melody Hoffmann (Southwest Voices, April 2, 2025).
UPDATES: Minneapolis Mayoral Candidate Omar Fateh Says His Campaign Office Was Vandalized – MPR News (September 25, 2025).
Minnesota Sen. Omar Fateh Says He Won’t Back Down Despite Islamophobic Threats – Brianna Kelly (Bring Me the News, September 25, 2025).
• The Longstanding Fault Lines Within the Democratic Party Have Surfaced Again in Minnesota
• Mike Figueredo on the “Political Malpractice” of the Democratic Party
• Something to Think About – July 25, 2025
• In His Efforts to “Build a City That Works for All,” Omar Fateh Secures a Key Endorsement
• A “Racist and Factless Meltdown” Over Omar Fateh
• Omar | Jazz | DeWayne
• What It Means to Be a Leftist in 2025
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Ted Rall: “Democrats Are Not the Left”
• Democrat Talk on the Eve of Trump’s Return
• “A New Chapter of the Democratic Party Needs to Begin”
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Election
• Mark Harris Quote of the Day – August 10, 2023
• The Biblical Roots of “From Each According to Ability; To Each According to Need”
• “We Must Challenge the Entire System” (2022)
• Will Democrats Never Learn? (2021)
• Marianne Williamson on the Contest Being Played Out by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (2020)
• Marianne Williamson: “Anything That Will Help People Thrive, I’m Interested In”
• Ricardo Levins Morales on the “Deepest Political Fault Line” Separating Democrats Ilhan Omar and Antone Melton-Meaux (2020)
• Heather Cox Richardson on the Origin of the American Obsession with “Socialism”
• Bernie Sanders: Quote of the Day – June 12, 2019
• Jonty Langley: Quote of the Day – August 17, 2011
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Socialism
• Something to Think About – December 14, 2011
• A Socialist Perspective on the “Democratic Debacle” in Massachusetts
• Obama a Socialist? Hardly
• Obama, Ayers, the “S” Word, and the “Most Politically Backward Layers in America”
• A Socialist Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis
• Capitalism on Trial
1 comment:
Thank you for the insight!
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