In 2022, years before a Minnesota Democratic socialist state senator, Omar Fateh, created shockwaves by winning the first ever endorsement for Minneapolis mayor from the city branch of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party — Minnesota’s Democratic Party operation — the now-35-year-old Somali-American was under investigation by a state senate ethics committee over two ethics complaints, both of them involving the 2020 state senate campaign that propelled him into politics.

At the time, the ethics investigations, which involved alleged campaign finance law violations and absentee voter fraud, earned Mr. Fateh intense scrutiny from senate DFL leadership. Now, three years later, Minneapolis delegates from the same party that investigated him have endorsed Mr. Fateh over the incumbent Minneapolis mayor, Democrat Jacob Frey, the first time in 16 years the Minneapolis DFL endorsed a mayoral candidate.  

“It seems incredulous to me that the DFL endorsed somebody like this with those scandals in his background,” the Minnesota Republican Party chairman, Alex Plechash, tells the Sun about Mr. Fateh. “It indicates the extremism that’s going on now within the Democrat party. It’s a lot of anti-capitalist rhetoric, and it aligns with the national organization and people like Zohran Mamdani,” the New York City mayoral candidate.  

The rise of Mr. Fateh at Minneapolis is being viewed by national political observers as evidence that the forces that have fueled Mr. Mamdani’s meteoric rise are at work outside New York City’s unique political climate. Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Fateh has a progressive mayoral platform that calls for raising income taxes on the wealthy to subsidize what he calls “compassionate public services” that include raising the minimum wage, rent stabilization, and police reform. 

Executive officers with the Minneapolis DFL forwarded questions from the Sun to a representative who did not respond by Tuesday night.

Also like Mr. Mamdani — whose been dogged by his continued reluctance to condemn the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” past statements calling the NYPD “racist” and “a major threat to public safety,” and calls to “build a socialist New York” — Mr. Fateh’s past controversies have served not as a curse but as a political blessing, earning him enough support to potentially propel him to the mayoral seat come November. 

This was perhaps unthinkable just three years ago, when Mr. Fateh, who currently represents south Minneapolis, where George Floyd died, was faced with two ethics complaints that state senators from both sides of the aisle saw fit to investigate. 

Mr. Fateh is a member of Minneapolis’s large and politically active Somali community, of which Representative Ilhan Omar, a member of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s far-left “Squad,” is a prominent member. In 2022, a campaign volunteer and Mr. Fateh’s brother-in-law, Muse Mohamud Mohamed, had been convicted of perjury after lying to a federal grand jury while under investigation for improperly handling absentee ballots during the 2020 primary election between Mr. Fateh and the incumbent senator, Jeff Hayden.

Minnesota allows absentee voters who cannot vote in person because of health or disability reasons to instead use “agent delivery,” a process in which an authorized agent with a pre-existing relationship with the voter can deliver ballots on his or her behalf.

Mr. Mohamed, testifying under oath, told the grand jury that during the August 2020 primary he had taken three ballots to three separate voters, who filled them out before he delivered them to the elections office. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Mohamed was lying — two of the voters whose names were on the envelopes testified that they did not know Mr. Mohamed or did not allow him to deliver their ballots.

In the 2020 senate primary, Mr. Fateh defeated Mr. Hayden by nearly 2,000 votes. While the two ballots allegedly mishandled by Mr. Mohamed were counted in that tally, the Associated Press reported it was not enough to “affect the outcome of any race on the ballot.”

In 2022, Mr. Mohamed, who is also the brother of a DFL state senator, Zaynab Mohamed, was convicted of two counts of lying to a grand jury and sentenced to six months of house arrest. Members of the DFL caucus called on Mr. Fateh to address Mr. Mohamed’s conviction “for the sake of his constituents and the public at large.”

In a 2022 statement, Mr. Fateh, who denied knowledge of Mr. Mohamed’s actions,  said he was “troubled” by his brother-in-law’s conviction, adding that he was “more committed than ever to organizing and governing to strengthen a free democracy.” 

However, the Minnesota Reformer, an independent news organization, reported that before the trial Mr. Fateh minimized his relationship to Mr. Mohamed in his conversations with DFL leadership. He also refused to dismiss his campaign manager, Dawson Kimyon, who Mr. Mohamed testified instructed him on where to pick up the absentee ballots. Mr. Kimyon was instead placed on leave by DFL leadership, and he would eventually resign from his new role as Mr. Fateh’s legislative aide. Ultimately, the senate subcommittee dismissed the ethics complaints related to Mr. Mohamed’s conviction.

Mr. Fateh and a DFL spokesman did not respond to questions sent to them by the Sun. Minnesota state senate Republicans and state senate DFL members did not respond to email messages from the Sun.

Around that same time, the state senate ethics subcommittee investigated Mr. Fateh for allegedly receiving free advertising from Somali TV of Minnesota, a nonprofit YouTube channel with more than 240,000 subscribers. Mr. Fateh said had personally paid for the advertisements but failed to include it on his campaign finance reports.

Months after Somali TV ran advertisements endorsing him, Mr. Fateh authored a bill that would provide $500,000 in state funding to the nonprofit. During the hearing, Mr. Fateh said he paid Somali TV $1,000 total for the campaign ads by paying through his personal Cash App account instead of through his campaign, sharing screenshots of his receipts with the subcommittee as proof. Mr. Fateh’s bill ultimately did not receive a legislative hearing.

In a 2022 affidavit, the president of Somali TV of Minnesota, Siyad Salah, said Mr. Fateh asked him to put a disclaimer on the campaign advertisement indicating it was paid for by his campaign.

“I forgot to post the disclaimer,” Mr. Salah said in the affidavit.

The Minnesota senate rules and administration committee ruled that Mr. Fateh did fail to disclose payments for his ads and passed a resolution ordering him to take campaign finance training from the state campaign finance board. The same committee found no evidence Mr. Fateh engaged in a “quid pro quo” with Somali TV. Mr. Fateh has since amended his campaign finance reports to reflect the $1,000 campaign ad expenditure.

Mr. Frey has since challenged the results of the Minneapolis DFL’s  endorsement of Mr. Fateh, citing missing votes and technical difficulties during the convention’s electronic balloting. 

“This election should be decided by the entire city rather than the small group of people who became delegates, particularly in light of the extremely flawed and irregular conduct of this convention,” Mr. Frey said in a statement. 

Regardless of whether Mr. Frey — who famously knelt before the golden coffin of George Floyd, shaking with tears while wearing a face mask, five years ago — prevails, Mr. Fateh still has momentum, something Mr. Plechash believes is a dangerous development for Minneapolis’s future.

“The city is in a downward spiral, and this guy seems to be just adding fuel to the fire. Of course, I didn’t really agree with the current mayor, Jacob Frey, but I feel for him. Because comparatively, he’s the voice of reason,” Mr. Plechsach told the Sun.