Frey is winning mayoral money race, but his opponents lead in these areas

Mayor Jacob Frey, aiming for his third term leading the city, is outraising his opponents and bringing in money from more individual donors across the city than any other candidate, campaign finance data show, but his major competitors have areas of donor strength.

At least 552 people living in Minneapolis donated to Frey’s campaign between August 2024 and the end of July, the most recent disclosure deadline. That’s over 200 more donors than his three opponents combined.

Frey has donors across the city, but most live in wealthy enclaves around the lakes, like Kenwood and East Harriet, or in downtown Minneapolis along the riverfront. His closest challenger, state senator Omar Fateh, has more donors in Phillips and Powderhorn, which are inside the district he represents, as well as nearby neighborhoods Whittier, Kingfield and Seward.

Campaign contributions are not a perfect proxy for political support. Donations can be a measure of voter enthusiasm, but they are also a display of who has money to give.

Wealthier residents have the means to donate, and campaigns are only required to disclose the addresses of those who give over $100, skewing the picture in the public data toward the preferences of the wealthy. Entire swaths of the city such as north Minneapolis and University of Minnesota-adjacent neighborhoods are barely represented.

Frey’s fundraising dominance does not guarantee electoral success in November. Fateh was able to win the Minneapolis DFL’s endorsement in July by turning out his supporters at the party’s convention. The state DFL revoked Fateh’s endorsement a month later.

Fateh is hoping to mobilize working-class voters by campaigning on issues such as rent control and a $20 minimum wage. Voters motivated by those policies may not be able to donate enough to appear in the data, if they can donate at all.

Pundits have drawn parallels between Fateh and fellow democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in the New York City mayoral race, raising questions of whether Fateh would attract dollars from enthusiastic out-of-state leftists. While more than half of Fateh’s fundraising comes from outside Minneapolis, most of that is from other parts of Minnesota, particularly the Twin Cities suburbs.

Frey’s challengers are campaigning together as a “mayoral slate for change” in hopes of denying Frey an outright majority under Minneapolis’ ranked choice voting system.

Fateh, along with former Plymouth Congregational Church minister DeWayne Davis and tech entrepreneur Jazz Hampton, have urged their supporters to rank any of them over Frey. If no candidate secures a majority in the first round of vote counting, votes will be reallocated based on voters’ second and third choices.

Frey has a 2-to-1 lead among donors in wealthier neighborhoods and also leads in neighborhoods that tend to turn out to vote in mayoral elections.

Support here puts Frey in a comfortable position ahead of November, but a closer look at the neighborhoods where Fateh, Davis and Hampton have support reveal that their messaging on housing affordability, protecting immigrants and disrupting the status quo may have some purchase.

Rent-burdened neighborhoods break starkly for the anti-Frey candidates, where they together have 133 donors to Frey’s 37. These are neighborhoods that have already elected City Council members more progressive than Frey, many of whom support Fateh’s push for rent control.

Fateh and Davis have also argued that the mayor hasn’t done enough to protect Minneapolis residents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which may appeal to donors in neighborhoods with more immigrants.

These areas of the city are densely populated, but they do not have a record of turning out to vote in high numbers.

Individual donors aren’t the only source of cash. State law caps the total amount one can donate to a campaign at $1,000. Those with deeper pockets often donate to political action committees, groups that spend on advertising, canvasing and other support to their candidates of choice.

At least two PACs — All of Minneapolis and We Love Minneapolis — have raised nearly $1 million to support Frey and his allies on the City Council, according to filings with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board. Those donations come from individuals, but also companies and other business entities.

Some donations to Frey-aligned groups have a likely connection to his opponent’s policies. Donations from developers and property management groups suggests those groups don’t want to see Fateh and his backing of rent control succeed. A $10,000 donation from Lyft suggests the rideshare giant doesn’t want to see the city attempt to regulate driver pay, an effort Frey vetoed last year. (The council overrode that veto, although the measure was pre-empted by state law.)

The Minnesota Star Tribune looked at contributions to each candidate’s campaigns between August 2024 and the end of July 2025, the most recent disclosure deadline. Individuals in the dataset with the same name and address listed were counted only once. Donations from organizations such as unions, or from the candidates themselves, were not added to the donor counts. Only donors with addresses confirmed to be in the city of Minneapolis were counted. Some donors may have listed work addresses.

To calculate which candidates had more donors in particular socioeconomic groups, we geolocated each donor address, aggregated them into census tracts and compared them to data from the American Community Survey.