How Melvin Carter lost the St. Paul mayoral election

Until the final weeks of the campaign, Mayor Melvin Carter’s third election as St. Paul mayor seemed assured.

He had plenty of money and the endorsements of both of Minnesota’s U.S. senators and Gov. Tim Walz. Even without much campaigning in the spring and summer, he wielded the advantages of an incumbent, with the mayor using the office to cast himself as a foil to the Trump administration and a leader on gun control in Minnesota.

And he had made his first two runs for the office look easy.

Today, Carter finds himself about to be out of a job after losing his reelection bid to a former staffer, Kaohly Her, a stunning result that will usher in the city’s first Hmong American mayor.

With Carter’s political future now in doubt, many in St. Paul and in Minnesota political circles are wondering how someone once seen as a rising star blew such a winnable campaign.

The son of a St. Paul police sergeant and a local politician with deep roots in the Rondo neighborhood’s Black activist community, Carter was first elected to the St. Paul City Council before he was 30. After stepping down for a job in Gov. Mark Dayton’s cabinet, Carter came back to city politics in 2017 with former Mayor Chris Coleman’s full backing and easily won the mayoral election.

When he was elected as St. Paul’s first Black mayor, Carter represented a changing of the guard — a new generation of leader who carried the hopes of old Rondo — as the city was becoming more diverse. His progressive vision, his youth and his gift for oratory even had some seeing parallels with Barack Obama. He won a majority in a three-way race against two well-known City Council members and had no serious opponent for his second term.

In 2021, even after unrest following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis tore through the Midway and downtown remained empty amid the pandemic, Carter steamrolled his way to a second term.

The 2025 race looked to be shaping up the same way when Carter announced his reelection bid in February — despite growing alarm about property taxes and the state of downtown on Carter’s watch. Tension was rising on neighborhood issues, too, especially a proposal for a new type of bike lane on Summit Avenue and the placement of a garbage truck garage just off West 7th.

Still, months passed and no well-known challenger jumped into the race. Carter’s campaign did not kick into gear either, missing opportunities to remind residents — and other potential candidates — that he was serious about another term.

Though the campaign held fundraisers and paid consultants, no one worked for the operation full-time to coordinate the work, according to campaign finance records.

The Carter campaign secured endorsements from two of the state’s most popular DFL politicians in Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Gov. Tim Walz. But there was no ground game in St. Paul: no shoring up support by calling voters and knocking on their doors, no recruiting volunteers, no yard signs.

In the summer, a special election for a City Council seat sucked up much of St. Paul’s political oxygen, with Carter backing Molly Coleman, the daughter of former Mayor Chris Coleman and the eventual winner of that race.

Carter did not respond to an interview request for this story.

One person with knowledge of Carter’s reelection campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely, said Carter’s lack of campaigning over the summer — not getting an early start on fundraising and door-knocking — resulted in a missed opportunity to scare off potential challengers.

It was late summer by the time Carter hired a campaign manager, according to two people with knowledge of the campaign. By then, rumors were already swirling about Her’s entrance to the race.

Still, Carter initially had a financial head start on Her, though the pace of fundraising had been slow all summer — slow enough for some to worry.

The warning signs behind the scenes were not the only problem.

Four years ago, St. Paul voters approved rent control by a narrow margin. Some observers say Carter’s last-minute endorsement of the measure put it over the top.

Since then, developers — especially Ryan Cos., the group that controls the former Ford Plant site in Highland Park — blame rent control for a slowdown in construction in the city. Though rising interest rates and COVID supply-chain troubles dogged building across the country, developers working in St. Paul said the city’s rent control policy was making the problem worse.

Almost immediately after the measure passed, Carter started trying to weaken it. He worked with the City Council to create a rolling exemption for buildings less than 20 years old in 2022. This year, he led a push to roll rent control back even further by permanently exempting all post-2004 construction from the 3% cap on annual rent hikes.

Still, Carter’s role in getting rent control approved shadowed him — especially with the business community.

Becky Wegscheid, the association’s government affairs director, said rent control was “top of mind” for members in making their endorsement. Though Her did not campaign around the issue in 2021, she said publicly that she voted against it.

Wegscheid said the group was also impressed with Her’s willingness to quickly reply to their emails and return their phone calls.

In the neighborhoods, the business community and even with some city employees, Carter’s administration had gained a reputation for being unresponsive — a sore spot Her increasingly hammered as her campaign ramped up in September.

“It’s important to have elected officials that answer the phone,” Wegscheid said.

Carter did get endorsements during the campaign from several unions, including the St. Paul Federation of Educators and the SEIU, which represents some city workers.

Thornberg said he had been trying to rebuild a working relationship with Carter’s administration after the city hired what he said was a team of hostile outside lawyers to work through arbitration with the firefighters.

But it was hard to get on Carter’s schedule, Thornberg said. And like the Realtor association, the firefighters found Her’s approach to be very different.

“She never left a text message unresponded to. She always returned phone calls,” he said. “She asked how she could help us, and that resonated with our members, who were feeling a little hopeless.”

That, and the years of tense labor relations, weighed on the firefighters when it was time to make an endorsement decision.

“The grandstanding, the gaslighting, treating labor as an obstacle — we’re fed up with it,” Thornberg said.

“When the firefighters get involved, we mean business,” he said.

With the help of the firefighters, campaign staff and volunteers, Her’s campaign says they knocked on 40,000 doors.

The campaign started slow, but as the weeks wore on, Her seemed to be everywhere in St. Paul, leaving yellow-and-pink campaign signs in her wake.

For most of September, Carter did little campaigning beyond appearing at a slate of several mayoral forums with Her and three other challengers. He leaned on official appearances, speaking about gun control or the city’s response to a fire that displaced hundreds from a Midway apartment building. The campaign also spent more than $150,000 on a consultant who makes videos.

It was not until the final weekends before Election Day that Carter’s field operation scaled up and sent large groups of staff and volunteers out to call voters and knock on doors.

Carter excels at talking to people, Basgen said, and with more time he could have convinced more voters he was still the best person for the job.

On election night, Carter led on the first ballot by almost 2,000 votes, but he did not garner a majority as he had in 2017 and 2021.

Instead, reallocation of votes from other challengers under the city’s ranked-choice voting system gave Her the narrow win — by 1,877 votes.