It won’t get much media notice, but two liberal cities that didn’t move towards social mayors were, of all places, Minneapolis and Seattle.

In liberal Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey defeated socialist State Senator Omar Fateh, who won the endorsement of Minneapolis Democrats this summer.

Fateh ran on sharply higher taxes on the “wealthy”, rent control, the potential takeover of private enterprises. In 2022, he supported a losing ballot measure to defund the police.  He also agreed with Mamdani about opening city-owned grocery stores.

Frey is no superstar, but he strongly opposed defunding the police and vetoed a law setting new minimum wage laws that almost drove Uber and Lyft out of the city.  His six-point victory was higher than his last re-election in 2021.

Meanwhile in Seattle (which saw one of its neighborhoods occupied for weeks by protestors after the 2020 murder of George Floyd), moderate mayor Bruce Harrell appears to have won re-election, although thousands of mail-in votes must still be counted.

He currently leads Katie Wilson, his openly socialist opponent, by ten points. He has attacked her promises to spend taxpayer money on online blogs and free summer child care as “a bill of false goods with checks that can’t be cashed.”

We often point out how left-leaning Blue States are losing residents and businesses to low tax and light regulation Red States. But the problem is even more pronounced in Blue Cities within Blue States. Socialist mayors will hollow out the very commerce and enterprise that made these cities great. But cities like Minneapolis and Seattle show that their victory is not inevitable.