The Death of Minnesota Man

Florida Man vs. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and white Midwestern Democrats

The Land of 10,000 Lakes has had a very strange relevance in American politics in the 2020s. It all began with George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020. This instance of police abuse against an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis sparked an entire, nationwide racial reckoning amid the height of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Minnesota became a flashpoint. It became a microcosm. It embodied white liberal guilt. A stereotypically white Midwestern state was now confronting racial tensions in its previously demographically homogenous community. The white “Minnesota nice” Democrat had to square what it meant to be white and liberal in the 2020s. No longer could you just hunt pheasants, shop at Menard’s, and vote for Jesse Ventura. It was a new world.

In 2020, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey served as an avatar for the guilty white millennial man. After the end of the pandemic and the second rise of Donald Trump, another white Minnesota man rose to national prominence, Governor Tim Walz, whom Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected as her running mate against Trump and Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.

Walz fell. Trump and Vance vanquished him even if he attempts a presidential campaign in 2028. Now, in the second Trump presidency in Year of Our Lord 2025, Jacob Frey must reckon with his white sins. He has lost the endorsement of the Minnesota Democrats in the upcoming Minneapolis mayoral election on November 4, 2025.

May Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey rest in peace. In the decade of the 2020s, we are seeing the death of the Minnesota Man.

Jacob Frey kneeling at George Floyd’s funeral on June 6, 2020.

The Shadow of George Floyd

In the image above, we see Mayor Jacob Frey kneeling before the gold-plated casket of George Floyd. His family held a public funeral in Raeford, North Carolina, on June 6, 2020. Floyd died two weeks earlier on May 25. As I have already written, George Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide racial reckoning. Highly publicized deaths of unarmed Black men were nothing new in the decade preceding Floyd’s death. We can remember the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin in Florida or the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri or Eric Garner in New York.

Floyd made much more of a mark because everyone was locked up at home endlessly consuming social media. The video of the police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck easily went viral along with the unforgettable quote from Floyd: “I can't breathe”. Perhaps if a civilian — instead of a Minneapolis police officer — killed George Floyd, then Jacob Frey would not have gotten so much attention, but the Minnesota Police Department is a direct organization within the City of Minneapolis, which Jacob Frey governs. In the City of Minneapolis, the buck stops with Frey.

Amid the peak of wokeness, of course, a white man overseeing a city where another white government official killed a black man is going to get criticism. It didn’t matter how much Frey telegraphed his progressivism. He was still a white man.

Consequently, in 2020, we saw bizarre images of white politicians kneeling on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. The image earlier in the article shows Frey kneeling before Floyd’s casket as if he is kneeling before a Catholic reliquary at a pilgrimage site. We may never forget Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York leading a group of congressional Democrats in wearing kente cloth as they kneeled in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

White Democratic leaders — Jacob Frey, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer — all needed to pay a penance. They needed to show contrition as Catholics do in the sacrament of reconciliation. We were entering a new secular religion of tolerance. Frey tried to set a model for how a white Democratic male politician should comport himself in the new socially progressive time, but this charade could only work for so long. He won re-election in November 2021, but — in November 2025 — he is facing an uphill battle as the Democrats in Minnesota nominated someone else … someone fittingly not white.

The Rise of Omar Fateh and Zohran Mamdani

On Saturday, July 19, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsed against their own incumbent mayor Jacob Frey in the 2025 mayoral race. Instead, they endorsed Omar Fateh, the first Muslim and first Somali-American member of the Minnesota Senate. For those unaware of Minnesota politics, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party refers to the Democratic Party. This is just a different name that the Democrats use in the state.

A state organization choosing to endorse against their incumbent mayor of the largest city in the state is shocking. They did so at their party convention, which admittedly is likely going to endorse the more left-wing candidate. Just as Zohran Mamdani does in New York, Omar Fateh represents the Democratic Socialists of America and serves in his state legislature. They also are both Muslim and would make history becoming the first Muslim mayors of each city. It is notable that these are two of the most important cities in the country with New York City perhaps being the most important city in the world.

We cannot separate Mamdani from Fateh. I do not think that the Minnesota Democrats would have made this move without Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary last month, but these two victories differ in one major way. Mamdani organically and democratically won a primary election while party insiders in the Minnesota DFL endorsed Fateh. Minneapolis also has no party primaries for the mayoral race. Every candidate from every party runs against each other in ranked choice voting, so Frey could still win re-election despite his party abandoning him.

Because almost 600 thousand New Yorkers voted for Mamdani — no centralized, concentrated, concerted cabal of party insiders selected him. Rather, Zohran Mamdani toppled the Democratic establishment in New York. He vanquished Andrew Cuomo, a scion of Democratic politics. Andrew Cuomo had served as governor of New York from 2011 to 2021 and as HUD secretary under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Andrew’s father Mario Cuomo famously served as governor of New York as well from 1983 to 1994.

On the other hand, party insiders chose Fateh without democratic input from the voters of Minneapolis. Sure, this endorsement does not confer any special privileges to Fateh on the ballot in November while Mamdani gets the moniker of “Democratic Party” beside his name on the ballot in New York. Meanwhile, incumbent NYC Mayor Eric Adams must run under the “End Anti-Semitism” ballot line or the “Safe & Affordable” ballot line. Despite his loss in June, Andrew Cuomo has chosen to run as an independent under the “Fight and Deliver Party” moniker.

Furthermore, when hundreds of thousands of people vote for you and your party establishment tries to torpedo you, there was no calculated plot to catapult you to the mayor’s office. Conversely, for some reason, the Minnesota DFL has gotten together and endorsed Fateh in an astro-turfed fashion. For him to earn this endorsement, Minnesota Democratic officials had to get in a room, deliberate, and unambiguously choose Fateh over Frey.

Why did the Minnesota Democrats abandon their incumbent mayor? Frey did not have corruption allegations in Minneapolis as Adams did in New York. Frey did everything right. He marched in BLM protests. He kneeled before the reliquary of the canonized Saint George Floyd. I suspect that the Democrats did not make this decision purely because of ideology. Perhaps they want to xerox the excitement in New York with Mamdani. Fateh is clearly trying to gain the social media virality that Mamdani has captured, but Fateh does not have the talent that Mamdani has.

Beyond this progressive excitement in these 2025 mayoral races, I suspect that the Minnesota Democrats are abandoning Frey in favor of Fateh for identity reasons. More so than Democrats in any other state, Minnesota Democrats want to prove their progressivism. Perhaps it is because of George Floyd. Minnesota has never left 2020. Republicans can lambast states like California or New York, but they do not have the shadow of George Floyd in the same way.

Californians and New Yorkers also do not have the “Minnesota nice” attitude. Even if New Yorkers voted for Kamala Harris, they will still scream expletives at you in the subway if you sneeze at them. In Minnesota, they immediately apologize if they sniffle near you. They will then begin to don their blue mask. White Democratic men like Jacob Frey and Tim Walz do not work anymore in Minnesota. The Minnesota Democrats must now appeal to the growing minority populations — specifically, Somali and Muslim populations — in Minneapolis and Minnesota as a whole.

I am very curious about these two mayoral races in November as the general elections get into full swing. Because of the Islamic faith of both Omar Fateh and Zohran Mamdani, opponents very well may use anti-Muslim dog whistles against them. We have already seen such rhetoric against Zohran Mamdani. Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo are weaponizing the issue of Israel over Mamdani. Perhaps Jacob Frey will follow the same path. More centrist Democrats who don’t want a socialist governing Minneapolis may find some questionable comments by Fateh in the past about Israel and use them against him. I do not even know what Fateh has said about Israel, but he’s a DSA member. There has to be something.

The Folly of White Progessivism

Throughout the past century, white Democrats have treated minorities as just votes. The white Democrats like to collect minority groups like Pokémon. The white Democrats feel good about themselves when they “help” the minority groups, but — if the minority groups ever deviate from the policies of the white Democrats — the white Democrats immediately chide them.

I recently saw this phenomenon in another Midwestern state with a large Muslim minority, Michigan. The city of Hamtramck, Michigan, is the only majoriy-Muslim municipality in the United States. Despite what white Democrats might prefer, Muslim Americans often hold much more socially conservative views. In 2015, Hamtramck elected the first majority Muslim city council in the United States. White progressives cheered this feat as “progress”.

But then, the Muslims in Hamtramck began to betray the white Democrats, especially, in the 2024 election. Because of his unique appeal to white working class voters over the past decade, Donald Trump has put Michigan back in the category of swing state. He shockingly beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Michigan by 0.23 percentage points. No Republican presidential nominee had won Michigan since George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Donald Trump did lose Michigan against Joe Biden in 2020 by 2.8 percentage points, but Trump won the state again in 2024 by 1.4 points, a greater margin than his margin in 2016.

Trump re-captured Michigan in 2024 because he regained margins with the white working class, but he cut into Democratic margins in Muslim communities surrounding Detroit, Michigan. The precinct map above from The New York Times shows the results in the Detroit area. Two areas with large Muslim populations, Dearborn and Hamtramck are two red islands in deep blue Wayne County, Michigan.

The data gets even more shocking when we look at the swings. Trump swung precincts in Hamtramck by over 100 points. Biden won this specific precinct in 2020 by 64 points while Trump won it by 38 points in 2024. Harris did not even place second in Hamtramck. Green Party nominee Jill Stein came in second behind Donald Trump. The Muslims in Michigan betrayed the white Democrats and secured a crucial swing state for Trump in his 2024 Electoral College landslide.

A decade after becoming majority Muslim, that same city council in Hamtramck banned the display of LGBTQ pride flags on public property during Pride Month. This decision came because, as I have said, Muslim Americans hold much more socially conservative beliefs than white Democrats even though most Muslim Americans are Democrats. Banning pride flags seems unthinkable from a good little Democratic voting bloc, but these Muslim politicians in Hamtramck betrayed the white Democrats by committing heresy. They were not celebrating Pride Month in 2025.

We can see this sanctimonious attitude from the white Democrat Catrina Stackpool, a former member of the Hamtramck City Council. In response to the ban, she made the following quote:

We welcomed you, we created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?

Firstly, Catrina Stackpool is treating the Muslim community in Hamtramck as a monolith. It consists of many immigrant groups: Bengalis, Yemenis, Bosnians, etc. These groups come from completely different parts of the world and are of different races, yet they are all people that the white Democrats in Michigan sheltered, clothed, and fed. The use of the word “repay” implies that the help was transactional. In no way can this new majority in Hamtramck deviate from Catrina Stackpool.

This gets to the essence of the “Midwest nice” white Democrat. They help these Muslim immigrant communities in Minnesota and Michigan with the veneer of selflessness, but the moment that these groups violate the white Democratic orthodoxy, Democrats like Catrina Stackpool will use language like “betrayal” and “stabbing us in the back”.

The white Democrats in Minnesota and Michigan used to rule the region. They were nice. They were polite. They were so nice and polite that they welcomed thousands and thousands of migrants from Somalia or Yemen, but the white Democrats assumed that they could maintain power.

Many of these politicians did all the right things. I do not know who will win the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral race, but I assume that Fateh has an advantage because the Democratic Party officially endorsed him. But what happens to poor Jacob Frey? He did everything that he was supposed to do. He marched with BLM. He kneeled before George Floyd, yet he cannot be enough for Minnesota nice. Minnesota doesn’t want him anymore.