New York City isn’t the only city where a socialist upstart is threatening to upend “establishment” Democrats’ municipal power.

A hotly contested mayoral race is under way at Minneapolis, where a two-term Democratic Socialist state senator, Omar Fateh, is running neck-to-neck with the incumbent, Mayor Jacob Frey, a two-term Democrat whom the city’s more progressive politicians now deride as a corporate-friendly moderate.

The Washington, D.C.-born Mr. Fateh, a Somali-American Muslim dubbed “the Mamdani of the Midwest” after his New York DSA counterpart, Zohran Mamdani, has run on a progressive platform that calls 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. 

Minnesota has a large Somali population — about 88,000, most of whom live in the Twin Cities area. Somalis refugees were welcomed en masse to Minnesota by the dominant Lutheran Church in the early 1990s after Somalia collapsed into a failed state. In recent years, Minnesota’s Somalis have been growing in political power, with Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali native who represents a district in the Minneapolis area, becoming one of the most visible faces of the far left. Mr. Fateh’s insurgent campaign is putting another face to the Somali community’s political muscle.

Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Fateh has turned past controversies — including alleged campaign finance law violations and absentee voter fraud — into a political blessing, earning him enough prestige support to potentially propel him to the mayoral seat come November. Ms. Omar, a member of Representative Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez’s far-left “squad,”  endorsed Mr. Fateh for mayor, praising his dedication to “enacting the transformative change Minneapolis residents are demanding.”

The mayoral race in the Twin Cities, like New York’s, will be decided by ranked-choice voting. Unlike the Big Apple, the ballot in Minneapolis includes 15 total candidates running for mayor in Minneapolis, and voters will have to rank their top three choices. 

In an unusual gambit, Mr. Fateh has joined forces with two fellow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates — Dewayne Davis, a minister, and Jazz Hampton, a businessman. The three men, who are black, are  branding themselves the “slate of  change” and urging voters to rank all three to unseat Mr. Frey.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes by Tuesday evening, Minneapolis city officials will begin eliminating the lowest-polling candidate, transfer the votes to the next available candidate, then count second- and third-choice votes on Wednesday. Their rationale: When one challenger is eliminated from the race, their votes are moved to the next ally. This “rank all three” approach is “turning a system designed to reward consensus into a strategy for collective opposition,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported last month. 

Mr. Frey, who by most standards would be considered a liberal, has meanwhile netted endorsements from establishment political figures like Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz. But in August, the two leading state officials remained mum in response to reports that Mr. Fateh’s campaign staffers glorified Hamas’s “justified” attacks and called for Israel to be “dismantled.” 

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. 

Throughout the race, Mr. Fateh’s campaign has not been focused on “bold new socialist ideas as much as a campaign against Mr. Frey and his centrist, corporate-friendly liberalism,” Slate writes.

After Mr. Frey resisted calls to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department following the 2020 fatal arrest of George Floyd, he became the subject of political rebuke by the Democratic Socialists in the Minneapolis city council.

Meanwhile a viral clip of Mr. Fateh waving the Somali flag and speaking Somali at a campaign rally garnered some blowback from Republicans. Remarking on the video, a Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, wrote on X: “For decades, the major elements of institutional power in America joined forces to transform our cities. The scale of their project has no precedent.”

“Minneapolis has gone downhill, especially since the BLM riots of 2020,” Governor Ron Desantis said. “The city has lost population, and the election of a mayor who prioritizes a foreign country over our own will only accelerate the decline.”