St. Paul city council elections: Socialism on the march!

Minneapolis isn’t the only core Metro city with an election next week.

All seven of St. Paul’s city council seats are up for election on November 7 and there are no candidates running unopposed. The current council consists entirely of Democrats, with only three incumbents (Wards 2, 4, and 6) running for re-election.

Theoretically, with four open seats, control of the city council is up for grabs next week. Upon closer examination, not so much.

A total of 30 candidates are vying for the 7 seats, contested in single-member Wards. As in Minneapolis, the city uses Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) to count votes and decide outcomes.

Of the 30 candidates, 14 identify as Democrats and one as a Republican. The remainder are some combination of nonpartisan/independent/other affiliation, in this officially nonpartisan election.

Ward 1 is open this year and features the most candidates of any race, with eight (8). In Wards 4 and 6, with incumbents running for re-election, each faces a single challenger.

Unlike Minneapolis, the ideological lines between slates of candidates are much less clear, as the following scorecard reveals,

A shown by the yellow highlighting above, in Wards 5 and 6, the local socialists (TC DSA), the local Democratic party, and the allegedly more “pragmatic” Minneapolis Star Tribune, are all endorsing the same candidates. Socialism has now gone mainstream in the state’s capital city.

Likewise, in Wards 1, 4, and 7, both the Star Tribune and the far-left advocacy group TakeAction MN support the same candidates. The Star Tribune and the far-left differ in only a single race, Ward 3.

In the above scorecard, we’ve included candidate-reported endorsements from two other far-left advocacy groups: Faith in Minnesota and the Bernie Sanders group Our Revolution MN.

In contrast to the case in Minneapolis, the large fields for each seat afford St. Paul Republicans, at least unofficially, the opportunity to back a candidate for each race. Only one of these seven appears to be actually running as a Republican in this officially nonpartisan contest.

Good luck on Tuesday, everyone!