On the Friday before St. Paul’s Nov. 7 election, city council member Mitra Jalali joined leaders of the St. Paul Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and members of Faith in Minnesota/ISAIAH, a progressive interfaith advocacy organization, outside the Karibu Grocery and Deli on Payne Avenue to advocate for raising the city’s sales tax to fund roads and parks.

They were joined by Black Hart of St. Paul bar owner Wes Burdine, as well as labor organizers from the Service Employees International Union, which represents frontline workers in the commercial cleaning and health care sectors, and LIUNA Local 563, which represents everyday laborers in the construction industry.

Also among the participants in the speak-out was Amina Abdulahi, a member of ISAIAH’s Muslim coalition, who took the microphone to share in Somali her experiences as an East Sider.

“In Ward 7, our roads are broken,” said Abdulahi, communicating through an interpreter. “Fixing the roads, and the community centers for our youth … on Nov. 7, everyone should say ‘yes’ and vote ‘yes.’”

If that sounds like an unusual assemblage of advocates, progressive organizers say it shouldn’t.

Two days later, Jalali joined a similar coalition led by the St. Paul DFL at the Linwood Recreation Center on St. Clair Avenue. From there, more than 150 volunteers — including many members of Faith in Minnesota/ISAIAH — fanned out across the city in a get-out-the-vote drive that drew Mayor Melvin Carter and other prominent door knockers.

On Tuesday, the sales tax question — a priority of the mayor and City Hall — sailed through the ballot box with 60% of the vote.

‘Organization and energy’

It wasn’t the first time that a campaign dear to left-leaning advocates, the St. Paul DFL, labor, immigrant and faith communities had held sway in St. Paul. In recent years, the city has become a testing ground of sorts for progressive causes ranging from tobacco restrictions to a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, the mayor’s guaranteed income pilot project, library fine forgiveness and rent control.

Organizers said gaining momentum on those issues has required long-term relationship-building with diverse groups, including immigrant leaders, and responding to everyday concerns about city services without abandoning a broader social vision.

“You can’t just buy an election. Spending money on mailers and digital ads is not enough,” said Vivian Ihekoronye, lead organizer with ISAIAH, in an interview Thursday. “Many of the leaders who were participating in the campaigns, I didn’t just meet them this year. I met them when I first started six years ago. They were part of the organized trash campaign. They were part of the rent stabilization campaign. They come from churches, or come from neighborhoods and just know people who come through the churches.”

“It wasn’t just door knocking, phone banking,” Ihekoronye added. “It was the 15-minute debriefs between the shifts: ‘What did we learn? What do we need to improve on going into the next shift?’ … We don’t have to choose between being pragmatic and pursuing equity. That’s a false choice. We can do both and we need to do both.”

Political analyst Blois Olson called progressive organizers like Faith in Minnesota and TakeAction Minnesota seasoned campaigners.

“They have an organization and energy that is very tough to challenge,” Olson said.

Looking nationally, St. Paul’s progressive candidates and campaigns may have been buoyed by tailwinds that landed progressives above moderates and pushed Democrats past Republicans in political races across the country, from the Boston City Council to the Virginia Legislature, where Democrats now control both houses. The Democratic governor of red-state Kentucky won re-election, defeating a Republican challenger. Ohio voters enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational marijuana. Closer to home, St. Louis Park elected the nation’s first Somali-American mayor.

Streets and potholes

Still, all politics, as they say, is local, and the best advertisement for the sales tax hike may have been the roads themselves, which emerged from spring thaw this year riddled with potholes.

“By the time we get to spring, it’s like a ‘Jumanji’ video game, trying to drive your car down these side streets … (with) median claims for pothole damage being upwards of $700 this year,” said Jalali, during the Nov. 3 speak-out, noting that moving more road reconstruction costs onto property taxes would increase housing costs without capturing revenue from city visitors.

Like the mayor’s sales tax proposal, Jalali and other progressive candidates fared well in St. Paul races on Tuesday. Two candidates endorsed by the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America — Hwa Jeong Kim and council member Nelsie Yang — won their city council races by wide margins.

The progressive strategy in St. Paul, said Jalali, has been to move beyond glossy fliers and engage in door-to-door conversations, increasingly in multiple languages, and bring together a broad, multi-ethnic cross section of people “who share life experiences with inequity, and government not working the way it’s supposed to.”

Jalali won re-election to the Ward 4 seat on the St. Paul City Council on Tuesday with 79% of the vote against a conservative challenger, the largest margin by far among the 30 candidates on the ballot.

“The second ingredient is hard work,” she said on Wednesday, the morning after her win. “We saw a lot of well-funded opposition that quite frankly wasn’t committed to doing the work, and thought they could just dump mail into the wards, with questionable donors.”

Key campaigns

Each political ward, according to Faith in Minnesota organizers, was approached a bit differently.

“This was a year that was significantly leader-led,” Ihekoronye said. “A team of four in Ward 3 built out a team of 30, who then built out a team of 47 people total. In Ward 7, we had the Muslim coalition, who had a team of about five leaders who were really excited about the election, and then through that they worked to involve another 10 people who were involved.”

In the last few weeks of the election season, Faith in Minnesota officials said they coordinated closely with the DFL and filled over 350 door-knock shifts, contacting St. Paul residents more than 31,000 times to support council candidates Saura Jost in Ward 3, Kim in Ward 5 and Cheniqua Johnson in Ward 7.

“All three of these DFL-endorsed candidates are a reflection of our collective belief in creating a St. Paul that works for all residents, regardless of their race, gender, age or income,” said the St. Paul-based organization, in a written statement released the morning after the election.

Jost, Kim and Johnson, all of whom also carried the St. Paul DFL endorsement, were the top vote-getters in their respective council races on election night. Still, that’s not to say they had an easy time of it.

In Ward 7, Johnson failed to clinch the requisite 50% of the vote on election night. After the polls closed, Pa Der Vang — backed in part by rent-control opponents such as the Minnesota Multi-Housing Association — came within 246 votes of Johnson, or 5½ percentage points, in a six-way race that drew 4,400 total ballots.

Ward 3

In Ward 3, Isaac Russell drew funding and support from developers and labor unions critical of rent control, but his campaign acknowledged he was not perceived by voters to be as conservative as third-place candidate Patty Hartmann or as progressive as Jost, the winner. Losing the St. Paul DFL endorsement to Jost at the party’s ward convention last April also hurt him.

“The whole gap between Isaac and Saura at the DFL convention was Faith in Minnesota,” said Russell’s campaign manager, Matthew Sullivan, on Thursday. “There’s a number of instances where they’ve been the decisive factor in conventions.”

Ihekoronye said the key to unlocking votes in Ward 3 — which spans Highland Park, Macalester-Groveland and part of West Seventh Street — was promoting Jost’s progressive social vision, tempered by her problem-solving skills as a civil engineer.

“In Ward 3, we know that this is a high voter participation ward, and it’s a ward that has a lot of groups that have had a lot of power in our city for a long time,” she said. “They wanted to hear that the person who would be elected would be a pragmatic, thoughtful leader, and would be making sure our politics would be including people who would otherwise be left out. Because of redistricting, there’s more renters, and more young people. … We don’t want to strike a false choice between being a thoughtful leader and having a bold vision. Folks seemed to respond to Saura being an engineer, and Saura being an incredible listener.”

Early in the election season, labor unions concerned about rent control found that their surveys showed the mayor had a high approval rating among likely voters, despite the challenges the city has faced since the pandemic with crime and a visibly depressed downtown. Running a negative campaign against City Hall could backfire. Russell avoided it. Other candidates tried anyway.

Ward 1

In Ward 1, James Lo criticized several of the mayor’s priorities, including an elevated bikeway on Summit Avenue and the proposed sales tax increase for roads and parks.

“Right now, City Hall in St. Paul is not listening to you all to make our city better,” said Lo, during a League of Women Voters candidate forum in which he called for refocusing spending on core city services such as policing and pothole repair.

On election night, Lo — who had put former Ward 1 council member Dai Thao on his campaign payroll — drew 20% of the vote in the eight-way race, or half that of Anika Bowie, a Summit Avenue bikeway and sales tax supporter. Bowie, presenting herself as a third-generation daughter of the historically Black Rondo neighborhood, had campaigned with the backing of the mayor, who represented Ward 1 years earlier when he served on the city council.

Of the 30 candidates for city council, Lo was one of the best funded. In Jalali’s ward and other ward races, some moderate and conservative challengers appeared to have assembled little in the way of campaign infrastructure and did limited fundraising or courting of big, institutional backers such as labor unions, which constrained their ability to send out mailers or buy campaign ads.

City council member Yang, one of two candidates endorsed by both the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America and the St. Paul DFL, handily won re-election to the Ward 6 seat with 61% of the vote. Gary Unger, 82, who had entered the race relatively late in the election season and did limited campaigning, still managed to capture 38% of the vote on a police-friendly platform that opposed several of Yang’s priorities, from municipal child care subsidies for low-income families to the sales tax increase for roads and parks.