Can Somali-American Omar Fateh repeat Mamdani's success in Minneapolis mayoral race?

The Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party have endorsed Omar Fateh, a Somali-American Democratic Socialist, for Minneapolis mayor, helping put him on the path to become the first Muslim mayor of the state's largest city.

The endorsement was announced over the weekend at the DFL’s annual conference in which they vote for their choices for various races, this time choosing a challenger over the incumbent mayor, Jacob Frey.

In a social media post, Fateh, a 35-year-old state senator, wrote, "I am incredibly honoured to be the DFL endorsed candidate for Minneapolis Mayor. This endorsement is a message that Minneapolis residents are done with broken promises, vetoes, and politics as usual. It’s a mandate to build a city that works for all of us."

Fateh has been focusing his mayoral campaign on cost of living, advocating for affordable housing and higher taxes on the wealthy, similar to Zohran Mamdani, another Democratic Socialist who won New York's Democratic Party primary last month. 

This endorsement isn't Fateh's first political upset. In 2020, he defeated an incumbent Minnesota state senator, making him the first Somali American to hold the position.

The Minneapolis area has the highest concentration of Somalis in the US. Until less than 10 years ago, the community did not have high-profile political representation. However, with the election of Ilhan Omar to the state House, where she served from 2017 to 2019, and then to the US House, that has been changing.

For his part, Frey, who has served as Minneapolis mayor since 2018, argued that the election should not be decided by a few DFL delegates.

“This election should be decided by the entire city rather than the small group of people who became delegates,” he said in a public statement.

On Monday, Frey formally challenged the DFL's endorsement of Fateh, suggesting a high number of uncounted votes and asked for the endorsement to be invalidated.

"Only 578 votes were recorded in the mayoral ballot conducted using the electronic balloting system, despite the fact that over 1,000 delegates and alternates were checked in at the time of the first ballot," the campaign said in the release.

The DFL endorsement is an important vote of confidence, particularly when the state's Democratic Party chooses a challenger over an incumbent.

"Considering the city usually gives Democrats 8 percent or more of the vote in statewide elections, being able to campaign as the party’s nominee could count for quite a bit," J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told The New Arab.

"Of course, Mamdani's success in NYC probably has had a way of inspiring similar candidates across the country," he said. "This was also something we saw in 2018, as AOC's [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's] primary win gave a boost, or at least more visibility, to other younger, progressive candidates elsewhere."