St. Paul Mayor-elect Kaohly Her on how she won and what she plans to do next

Kaohly Her wants her term as St. Paul mayor to be different.

Maybe not ideologically apart from outgoing Mayor Melvin Carter, whom she once worked for as policy director, but more connected, more in the community, more curious about what’s happening and what people are saying.

In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune on Wednesday, the day after her historic election victory, she said she’s so conscious of avoiding a feedback loop that she wasn’t certain she had won until it was over.

“We always, always made sure that we doubted everything that we were seeing until we had multiple data points,” she said.

In fact, Her said, she left her job in Carter’s office in part because she thought the mayor had surrounded himself with too many people who said yes.

“I think that then you lose perspective and then you are stuck in an echo chamber and you aren’t able to course-correct until it is too late,” said Her, who has represented St. Paul at the Legislature for seven years.

Her campaign took her across the city, specifically because she was trying to talk to as many people as possible.

That plan was inspired by her friend, the late DFL House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who told her often that politicians had to earn their seats. The blueprint for winning races? Lots of conversations.

“How many doors did we hit? How many meet-and-greets do we have to hit? How many calls do I have to make this week? How much money do I have to raise?” Her said. “We literally just laid out the plan and we just executed and executed.”

Her said the campaign knocked on some 40,000 doors in St. Paul, and by late October her yellow-and-purple lawn signs had popped up all over the city.

In conceding the race, Carter pledged to support and cooperate with Her and her staff during the transition.

Her said Wednesday that she will count on that as she sets up her team and starts studying the city’s finances. She wants to look beyond 2026 and get the city in the habit of thinking longer-term to help St. Paul weather volatility in state and federal funding.

“If we want to build a city that has abundant and affordable housing, if we want to grow retail and commercial business, those three departments are key departments in being able to do that,” Her said.

That might sound dull compared to the big ideas Carter brought to the beginning of his tenure, Her said, but she thinks the city needs to nail those basic processes.

“I know that people are saying, ‘Well, she doesn’t have any huge, big policy ideas, so, like, what is she putting in front of us?’” Her said.

Her said she wants to run an administration that listens to St. Paul residents. But she said building consensus does not mean compromising her values.

During the campaign, Her drew criticism from St. Paul environmentalists and bike advocates who saw her questions about the proposed reconstruction of Summit Avenue as evidence that she was more conservative than Carter. She pushed back on that idea.