Why the path to the mayor’s office runs through southwest Minneapolis

In Minneapolis’ odd-year city elections, a small set of deeply engaged voters can play kingmaker. Turnout data from the last three mayoral races indicate that as residents of Ward 13 vote, so goes the city’s highest office.

Ward 13 encompasses the affluent neighborhoods of Armatage, East Harriet, Fulton, Kenny, Linden Hills and Lynnhurst, where the average household income is more than $100,000 and most people own their homes. While each ward’s population is roughly the same, residents in this southwest corner of the city flex outsized political influence by consistently hitting the polls in numbers outmatching any other ward.

In the last three mayoral elections, Ward 13’s registered voter turnout has outpaced every other ward and tracked seven to 14 points higher than Minneapolis as a whole, with total ballots representing up to 13% of the citywide tabulation.

Some years, the contrast with Minneapolis’ poorer neighborhoods is stark. This matters because differences in the voting power of neighborhoods across race, age and homeownership status can shape the priorities of elected officials.

“Politicians care about getting re-elected ... it’s sort of inherent in wanting to be a successful politician to cater to the people who are most likely to turn out to vote,” said professor Katherine Levine Einstein of Boston University.

Her research shows that while older, white homeowners reliably turn out to shape elections, the effect is even more dramatic in cities like Minneapolis, where mayoral races have lower turnout overall because they don’t align with presidential elections.

In Minneapolis, southwest residents’ preferences shaped the results of the last three mayoral races, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune analysis of the 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections.

When Jacob Frey unseated Hodges in 2017, stealing her thunder in southwest Minneapolis was key. His strongest support by percentages came from Ward 13 and the south-central Ward 6.

Frey won re-election decisively in 2021 and led the field for first-choice in most wards from Longfellow to the North Side. His strongest first-choice performance came in Ward 13. The ward is now represented by Council Member Linea Palmisano, an ally of Frey not facing a serious challenge this year.

In each of these elections, Ward 13 alone comprised about 15% of the winning candidate’s citywide first ballot totals, higher even than other big-turnout areas like wards 11 and 12, where a more mixed vote also favored the winner.

In 2021, a polarizing ballot question fueled the highest turnout in a city election since at least 1979, with 54% of all registered voters casting a ballot. Again, Ward 13 led the pack with nearly 68% voting, followed closely by wards 12 and 11 of south Minneapolis. Less than 42% of registered voters in north Minneapolis’ wards 5 and 4 voted — the city’s lowest turnout.

The election before that, 2017, was the last time there was a prominent Black mayoral candidate from north Minneapolis. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a racial justice activist, got the most votes from both North Side wards that year. But the strongest turnout ran along the city’s western border, where income trends higher.

By population, this enclave of about 1,200 residents is a fraction of the dense rental neighborhoods of Loring Park and Stevens Square-Loring Heights. The number of registered Loring Park voters who didn’t cast ballots in the last mayoral election was nearly triple the total population of Kenwood.

Raquel Sidie-Wagner, who managed U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s winning re-election bid last year, said when campaigns expend all their outreach energy on the south Minneapolis neighborhoods that turn out most reliably, they risk failing to activate the untapped voters in the heart of the city and its northern reaches.

These voters can see issues through a different lens. Lack of outreach and voter disaffection can become a self-perpetuating cycle, Sidie-Wagner said.

“When you’re thinking about wards 4 and 5, for example, on the North Side, you want to be really thoughtful about the fact that that is a part of the city that has often felt isolated, divested from, not considered,” she said. “When you’re in a place like that ... they need to hear from you that you are thinking of them specifically.”

Early in this year’s race, Ward 13 resident Kate Mortenson hosted a gathering of civically engaged women at her home in the Lynnhurst neighborhood. The topic — many rungs deeper into local electioneering than merely getting out the vote — was about ranked-choice voting and the multiple paths to the mayor’s office it creates.

Ward 13 is older and highly educated, savvy at the polls and in fundraising, she said. Voter sentiment is moderate. People joke it’s “West Edina.”

Yet it’s really not, Mortenson said, because southwest Minneapolitans care deeply about the city and its economic vitality. They want to age in place and are willing to shoulder a higher tax burden to support the public school system even after their kids have left their school years. There’s an understanding among her neighbors in Ward 13, Mortenson believes, that public safety is inextricably tied to providing equal opportunities for youth across Minneapolis.

“People here can have sort of a privilege, to be able to opine about those things,” she said. “But I do feel that in Ward 13, there’s an underworked muscle around the sway that we could have if we really wielded our voter power to hold elected officials accountable to being about the greater good and flexing to ensure that our resources are being very thoughtfully spread around the city, and are really being pegged to outcomes that benefit everybody.”

Graphics by Jeff Hargarten of the Minnesota Star Tribune.