Minneapolis’s incumbent mayor, Jacob Frey, a two-term democrat who was vilified by the city’s progressive politicians as a corporate-friendly moderate, won re-election in the final round of ranked-choice voting Wednesday, defeating Democratic Socialist upstart Omar Fateh and 13 other challengers.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Frey led Mr. Fateh, a Somali-American state senator who ran on a progressive platform, by nearly 10 percentage points in first-choice votes but did not clear the 50 percent threshold required to win under Minneapolis’s ranked-choice voting rules.

Mr. Frey ultimately secured his third term in office after first- and second-choice votes were tabulated, earning 50.03  percent of the vote versus Mr. Fateh’s 44.37 percent. Voter turnout set a municipal record, with 55 percent of registered voters casting ballots Tuesday than in any prior Minneapolis city election.

Mr. Frey is expected to hold a news conference Wednesday afternoon to discuss his victory.

Mr. Fateh’s loss is a defeat for Minneapolis’s large and increasingly politically active Somali population, whose most prominent figure is Ilhan Omar, a member of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s far left “Squad” who recently made insensitive comments about Charlie Kirk. Minnesota has about 88,000 Somali residents, most of whom live in the Twin Cities area. Mr. Fateh’s insurgent campaign made him the new face of the Somali community’s political muscle.

Mr. Fateh, a Muslim born at Washington, D.C., was dubbed “the Mamdani of the Midwest” after his New York DSA counterpart, Zohran Mamdani. He ran on a progressive platform calling for raising income taxes on the wealthy to subsidize what he calls “compassionate public services.” He also intends to raise the minimum wage to $20 by 2028, stabilize rents, and reform law enforcement in the city where George Floyd died in 2020. 

Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Fateh has turned past controversies — including alleged campaign finance law violations and absentee voter fraud — into a political blessing. But unlike New York’s newly-elected mayor, Mr. Fateh’s grassroots support wasn’t enough to propel him into office. 

In an unusual gambit, Mr. Fateh joined forces with two fellow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates — Dewayne Davis, a minister, and Jazz Hampton, a businessman — to form a “slate for change,” urging voters to rank all three to unseat Mr. Frey. But both Messrs. Davis and Hampton were eliminated after the first round of ranked-choice voting, having won just 14 percent and 10 percent of the vote, respectively. 

“They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be,” Mr. Fateh said in a statement. “Because now, truly affordable housing, workers’ rights, and public safety rooted in care are no longer side conversations; they are at the center of the narrative.”

Mr. Frey, who is Jewish, begins his third term facing a hostile progressive majority on the Minneapolis City Council, with whom he has sparred over law enforcement and budget issues. He resisted their calls to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department and vetoed a $1.9 billion city budget and a pay raise for rideshare drivers. 

The city council successfully overrode Mr. Frey’s veto of a planned pedestrian plaza at the intersection where the 2020 fatal arrest of George Floyd took place. The plaza will be named “George Floyd Square” and will protect the area around a memorial to Floyd of a giant brown fist clenched around a “pan-African flag.” Mr. Frey unsuccessfully sought a “flexible street option” that would not close off a stretch of street from car traffic and force a public bus line to be rerouted. 

The progressive bloc retained its majority on the City Council in Tuesday’s election.

Last summer, Mr. Fateh made headlines by winning the first ever endorsement for Minneapolis mayor from the city branch of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s version of the Democrats. But that endorsement was eventually rescinded by the Minnesota DFL — as party officials feuded over the controversial endorsement — after an internal investigation found the “substantially flawed” electronic voting undercounted the first round tally by 176 votes.