Welcome to the latest installment of Let's Taco 'Bout Politics, a series that has us sitting down with as many 2025 Minneapolis mayoral candidates as possible over Mexican food. Over the coming weeks, joined by Wedge LIVE! correspondent Jason Garcia, we’ll be getting tacos, burritos, quesadillas, and tortas with as many mayoral candidates as possible. In the hot seat this week…
Name: Rev. Dr. DeWayne Davis
Current Position: Lead Minister, Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis
Background: Davis was born and raised in Mississippi Delta, the 15th child of former sharecroppers; today he lives in the Willard-Hay neighborhood of north Minneapolis with his husband Kareem. For 10 years, he worked as a senior legislative assistant in D.C. with Democratic congressmen Pete Visclosky (Indiana), Chet Edwards (Texas), and Steny Hoyer (Maryland). Davis moved to Minneapolis in 2013 and has been lead minister at Plymouth in Stevens Square since December 2020. He was the first candidate to announce his 2025 mayoral run last October.
What’d he order?: A chicken quesadilla from Brito’s Burrito ($7.75), plus a side of chips and guacamole ($4.25). “I had a burrito last time I came here, but I’m talking to reporters—in Washington, you need to calibrate who you’re talking to,” Davis laughs. “You want food that you can get to, get easily, and that you can stop chewing.”
Em Cassel: I’m going to start with the obvious, which is: Tell me a little bit about why you want to run for mayor. You were the first to throw your hat in the ring, so you were really inspired.
DeWayne Davis: One of the reasons I want to run for mayor is that I think we have gotten stuck in this city, and certainly, [that can happen] when you are challenged by what we’ve gone through as a city—especially since the murder of George Floyd and subsequent murders, Amir Locke. For me, it started with Jamar Clark in 2015, in my neighborhood in north Minneapolis. The challenges we have in front of us are daunting, and clear. We’ve forgotten what’s good about us, and we’ve had an incumbent mayor who I think has not met the moment, who, as a matter of fact, has fallen short.
When I became co-chair of the mayor’s Community Safety Workgroup, that was a wonderful opportunity to engage not just with the leaders who are around the table but to talk to our community about what they were feeling. And it was during that experience that people raised the possibility of me running for mayor. I thought, “No, that’s not how I feel I can offer myself.” But when the Chauvin trial occurred, when Chauvin was convicted, I still saw a sense that we were stuck, and a mayor that did not know how to bring us together, or remind us what was good, about what we can do. I felt there was an attempt to gloss over what had gotten us to where we were: to have someone murdered in the streets, and no real reckoning with it. Not just a reckoning, but a vision—a vision for how to address what had gotten us to that point, and then a forward-looking vision that says we are equal to the task. And as I became frustrated with that, I then also felt like I wanted to show up differently, that I did have skills, skills going back years, to when I worked, 10 years, in the Capitol in Washington D.C. I wanted to be counted among the ones who put the skin in the game, who got up from my comfortable perch.
Cassel: I think that sounds like something I hear people on all sides talking about—a feeling of being stuck, or going backwards, even.
Jason Garcia: Especially over the past four years, but going back eight, 10, 12 years, there has been a feeling that we are the city that has been a leading light in a lot of ways, but we’ve also been incredibly inequitable and unequal in a lot of ways. Over the past several years, when it comes to policing outcomes, public health outcomes—we’re on track to hit $75 million in police conduct payouts this year since 2017. Right now, one of the things that the current administration has raised a lot is interference from the City Council; “City Council is holding us back.” How would you, as a relative newcomer to city government, work to bridge that divide and repair some of those gaps?
Davis: When the mayor got the strong mayor responsibility, he had a choice to make. He could have come in with the approach of power with, or power over. I think he embraced it as a competitive edge, forgetting that you have a city and you have elected officers who can work with you in this city. He has a distinct position from the City Council, but every one of their constituents is his constituent. And so when you work with the council, you have to keep in mind, these are not your friends or your enemies. You represent the people that elected them, and you owe them the respect of their office.
I think what is really going on is that I don’t think this mayor has a vision. And absent a vision, it’s like a Whac-A-Mole. You take a position in opposition to them because they are your enemies to vanquish, as opposed to saying, “Here are the issues in front of us, what is our shared goal to solve them?”… What I want to do is to come in and say, “I’m your partner, we can do this work.” In structure, I may have more power than you, the system has given me this power. But power or little power, how you deploy that power and in service to what, matters. What I want to say is, “Listen, you don’t have to guess what I want. Here’s what I want. Here is my vision. Here are the things I’m going to spend my political capital on. Where can we work together?”
Not only do I commit to work with every council member, but we’re going to make sure that at least on one occasion, me and the council members are going to have a joint community meeting together—even with the ones I disagree with—where we take questions or talk about what we’re working on together as a sign of accountability… I think our constituents would really appreciate the transparency and the idea that we’re working together, and it puts us both in an accountability relationship with each other.
Cassel: I’m curious how your role as a faith leader would inform or interplay with your role in government. Obviously, you’re someone your congregation looks toward, you have a familiarity with this kind of leadership role and what it means to lead with vision, but how—or would—that inform your time in office?
Davis: My parents were ministers, so I grew up with this sort of service posture. I grew up in one of the poorest counties in Mississippi, the youngest of 15 kids, and so by the time I was born my parents had a firmly working-class, middle-class life. My worldview was informed by helping, but also the power of the government—how the government can play a role in helping people get a good chance in life. When I worked in politics, I worked in all the human needs stuff: healthcare, disability, housing, human and civil rights.
The thing about being a minister is that you get to experience people at the most wonderful moments in their lives and then you get to encounter people when they’re going through the worst moments in their lives. The quintessential part of this is the inherent worth and dignity of the person who’s in front of you. That’s really important to me in politics. It was sort of a nascent, background understanding when I was a young staffer, all idealistic. But as I get older, I think it’s something worth articulating, worth leading with. I would want to impress this upon not only the staffers who work in my office but also the City Council and everybody else. Every decision we make, every decision we don’t make, every act of commission, every act of omission—it lands on an actual, living person.
When you sweep an encampment and don’t do anything else, when you fight over a Labor Standards Board that you said that you agree with, there are living, actual, breathing people behind it. And my faith honed that for me. I cannot go into that church and rightly say that I believe in a God of love, that I believe in a Christ of freedom and liberation, if I cannot get down to the experience of the actual person who’s trying to get a job and live, to feed their family, who needs health care, or is in the throes of a mental health challenge or substance abuse disorder… If I had stayed in politics, if I had stayed a staffer, I don’t think I would have run for office. I don’t think I would have gotten to this point where I felt, “I have something to say.”
Garcia: To kind of piggyback on that, you brought up the issue of sweeping unhoused encampments and not really having any follow-up for people. As you look forward and see yourself being the mayor of Minneapolis, what would be the first things you would change about that response? How would you start to address things at that individual level, honoring the whole person?
Davis: The first thing I want to start with is, I definitely would stop the sweeps. For one thing, I don’t think the police want to do this. I know the police don’t want to do this. I also think that’s where we get to the question of dignity. They want to remind us that there’s criminal activity—yes. But to a certain extent, if there’s criminal activity, why not respond to the criminal activity? People who are unhoused because they can’t afford it, or people who have mental health challenges, why sweep them up and criminalize that experience? So, stop the sweeps, though there is a place to do what they do, which is respond to crime, wherever it is.
I want a considered response to the encampments. How do we get to encampments? We get there because there have been years of failure to invest in human needs and into housing. Now, what that calls for is to have a strategy—some of that is short term, some of it is intermediate, and some is long term. But the first thing you do is reinvest in the conditions, so what I mean by that is, leverage the city’s purse, regulatory power, legislative power, and ownership of property to set the table for coordination of effort. There are no shortage of providers out there who are willing to work on this, but if they don’t have any committed dollars, and with their other work around the county, how can they be convinced or be brought in, that we’re going to help you do what you need to do?
We set the table—provide investment of dollars, regulatory changes, legislative changes, property—something to set up so that people can plug in, providers, substance-abuse disorder councilors, mental health providers, so they can be able to work with a structure that is financed and supported. If you set that up, then we can begin to think about, “What are some intermediate things we need to do?” What kind of shelter beds do we have to purchase? What kind of shelter do we have to invest in? Then you have something where you can go to the county and say, “Can you help us fund this?” Then go to the state and say, “This is what we’ve created, we need more funding so we can begin to address all of these issues?”
That requires investment of dollars, imagination, coordination of services, and then, using your political capital to get the other levels of government to respond and help you fill out the vision. Guess what? Some if it ain’t sexy—it’s gonna be a long time before you get out to cut a ribbon. That’s not what it’s about. It’s hard work.
Cassel: I think that’s part of the reason we get stuck here, is that a sweep is, for all its cruelty, an immediate change that is visible to the people living in the neighborhood, to your constituents. It’s not sexy and it’s not easy to make the sort of long-term changes that we’re talking about.
Davis: And when you do a sweep, you satisfy these people who saw the sweep. But that encampment is going to set up somewhere else, because we don’t have that strategic, long-term planning so we can prevent it from even happening.
Garcia: My mother worked in public housing for 40 years, and one of the things that she would always express to me when I was younger is: People who are running for office should have to, for as long as the public housing waiting list is, that’s how long they should have to agree to go without being paid. And it is terrible when you look at how many people have applied for public housing, how many people are on the waiting list to get a voucher.
As a nation, we’ve been disinvesting from public housing since the ’80s, so coming up on 40 years now. Is that something that you have the stomach for, to push for public housing to be a bigger part of that solution?
Davis: Oh, absolutely. It’s funny, when you say “disinvestment,” what happens when you do that? Then you turn to privatization. Too much of government has been privatized, too much of what the government should be doing, we’ve been leaving to privatization. I think we’ve sort of overcorrected in some ways, especially in housing. There are a lot of projects that are going on around the country with people trying to get back to this concept of investment in public housing. We have private developers—what about public developers?
Montgomery County, Maryland, is thinking about that. They have a revolving housing trust that, again, allows them to loan money for a project, but they can have some ownership. Atlanta is working on this idea of economic development corporations strictly on housing, and they have first access to city property, but the idea is, that economic development corporation owns all of the project or 51%. If the public owns 51%, that’s the thing that determines if you’re going to have these exorbitant increases in rent… It gets to this idea of public development where we have these entities that are not for profit-making but that are able to engage a broader swath of public dollars and people.
Private developers do great work—we do want to get that vacancy rate up so people always have options. All around the country, it’s a supply issue. If we don’t have enough housing, those of us who are able to afford it, we bid up the price.
Cassel: DeWayne, we are sitting here at Brito’s Burrito, within spitting distance of your congregation—I can see your church out the window. Is this a place you frequent?
Davis: It’s the second time I’ve come here! A bunch of the staff was in the staff kitchen, they were all having lunch, and I said, “I’m going to Brito’s, make sure you come and get something to eat here.” We really have been struggling with crime on our corner. I have come out after two shootings to talk to the police, I have a security staff that is very much here.
This corridor, we have been working both with the police to talk about how to get their presence, and to figure out how we can be a partnering presence. We’ve empaneled a campus task force that is two years into its work, and what they've been doing is trying to figure out how our building can be used as a community hub, how we can be constructively engaged. Family Tree Clinic, that was our property, and we made that property available to Family Tree Clinic because we were trying to really—you can’t have this much footprint and not be engaged. Over the years, as privileged people, many of our people... they leave! And so this campus task force is trying to remind us that even though you live elsewhere, you come here two days or two nights a week, we’re part of this community.
And we’re also very sensitive—typically when you have people with our power and privilege, they come in and they try to take over. We have committed that we are relinquishing, and we are very sensitive about, our power.
It broke our collective hearts when we found out CVS was leaving. It has initiated some conversations… We house Groveland Food Shelf, and we are bursting at the seams, which is a commentary on the world, too. So, is that a place that we could imagine, Groveland Food Shelf going over there, if that is within our means? These are questions that we’re wrestling with. But we are really trying to figure out, in a different way, how to be a constructive neighbor.
Garcia: That’s a really interesting perspective, how as a church congregation and a church building you integrate into a neighborhood that has faced a lot of struggles. And within this neighborhood, there are so many positive things—you have a lot of new buildings, you have access to public transit, you have one of the gems of the Minneapolis park system. You live in a different area, you work here, what are some of the local things, both here and where you live, that you enjoy, or that make you feel at home?
Davis: So I live in north Minneapolis, I live right around the corner from North Commons Park, and that is a regular part of life for my husband and I—my dog thinks the Commons Park is his own. He jealously guards it. But Loring Park, I walk to work in the summer, and Loring Park is how I come.
We have two big things that we do on the lawn and in the parking lot. We have our Rally Sunday which happens in September, and we have our Christmas Festival. I’ve really started to enjoy those, because we’ve started, so that it won’t just be a Plymouth Church thing, we bring in food trucks. That’s the time when neighbors come. And we like that! During Covid, we put out a tent to do worship, and that’s how a lot of people in the neighborhood really got to know us. And Plymouth Church built the Lydia apartments across La Salle, and so many of the residents at Lydia consider Plymouth their church. But I enjoy those festivals, because it’s so wonderful to have the families, the bouncy house and all those things. I enjoy those days when people trust us, and they come, and they find us to be a presence that’s welcoming. We’re trying to harness that.
When I first got to Plymouth, right after Covid, we brought the farmers market. I’m a cook, so I like to look at the tomatoes, if someone has collard greens—I am from Mississippi now, so if there are collard greens to be had… but not only is it a place for people to come and shop, but it was a place where Plymouth was a part of the neighborhood. We want to bring that kind of life back. This is stuff that’s part of who we are as Minneapolis. And it’s not our fault. Covid, I think, made us forget it, George Floyd was the nightmare that traumatized us in some ways. This is what we need in a mayor, to remind us and be the embodiment and the bully pulpit to remind us of who we are.
Garcia: Since you brought up the fact that you’re a cook, tell us about some of the other things that you enjoy eating, or the things that you enjoy cooking at home.
Davis: I go all over the place. I’m kind of a foodie. So during the summer I walk, and one of my routes is the North Loop. I love the food houses. I like Ray J.’s. And I can just try things—my husband and I frequent Freehouse in the summer, but I also love the coffee shop there because they have great Bogart’s Donuts. I love food trucks, too, so it’s not uncommon when I walk, of course we have these bars and breweries—it’s not uncommon for me to stop. I’ve walked 10 miles! So I love that we’re a food truck place. I love high-end restaurants, but we walk to Twins games during the summer, and some days I just want a brat and a beer.
I’m a pretty eclectic food person. Two of our dearest friends in the world are vegetarians, so now we’re going to different places—vegetarian, vegan—and I love when vegetarians make some kind of sausage, because they’re very heavy on the seasoning. At home, I’m truly the son of a southern Black woman. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, so I do turkey and dressing and collard greens and corn bread from scratch. I do a chicken pot pie from scratch, that’s my husband’s favorite. I make my momma’s sweet potato pie, which is the best. And I’m very basic in this regard: I just love to make a good chocolate chip cookie. A little heavy on the butter.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For more on Davis’s vision for Minneapolis, check out his conversations with Southwest Voices, North News, and the Minnesota Daily.
Previously in Let’s Taco ‘Bout Politics, we sat down with Minneapolis City Council Member Emily Koski. Check back for conversations with Omar Fateh, Jazz Hampton, and the rest of this year’s mayoral candidates.
