It’s probably best remembered as the election with the honest-to-god pirate. Or maybe as the one that introduced the entire nation to a video campaign ad titled, “A Lake, A Cup of Coffee, and a Bulge.” Perhaps you remember it as the one where the eight leading candidates, linked arm-in-arm, sang “Kumbaya” following a final debate (there had been three dozen) from inside Westminster Presbyterian Church. 

More than anything, the 2013 Minneapolis mayoral election is defined by a number: 35. That’s how many mayoral hopefuls—establishment DFLers new and old, a couple right-wing challengers, and more than a few fringe oddballs—crowded the ballot box, inspiring headlines coast to coast in the vein of “Wild and crazy Minneapolis mayor’s race.” 

Beneath the clown-car silliness, however, real issues that would shape the future of the city percolated. The election would become the first real test of ranked-choice voting, which debuted in Minneapolis in 2009. Several DFL dinosaurs would roar one last time, reluctantly making room for new generations of civic leadership. And the eventual winner, City Council Member Betsy Hodges, would preside over a transition period in Minneapolis politics, the flicker in time before the mayoral powers strengthened, the world watched George Floyd’s murder, and City Council ideological divides sharpened.  

But first, she’d have to out-duel Captain Jack Sparrow. 

“I basically ran on what we would now call not just a platform but a campaign plan of belonging,” Hodges tells Racket. “And one of the lessons, for me, of that, was organizing based on belonging can work—if it genuinely includes everyone. Because otherwise, you’re left with the divisiveness of campaigns based on othering. Which is most of what happens in this country.” 

Oh, yes: And 2013 is most certainly responsible for the mayoral entry fee ballooning from $20 to $500 (or 500 signatures). Bad for democracy? Maybe. Great for sanity? Absolutely. 

Here’s the story of that strange year in local politics, as told to Racket by the candidates, journalists, political scientists, and commentators who lived it. (Quotes have been edited for length and clarity; we dug up the footnote-accompanied sources from the dusty ol’ internet archives.) 

Let’s go back to 2013…

Competing Visions to Replace Rybak

In early 2013, citing a need for “more balance” in his life, incumbent Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak announced he wouldn't seek a fourth term of his "dream job." Had he run and won again that fall, the then-57-year-old politician would have leapfrogged Don Fraser as the city's longest-serving mayor. Rybak bowing out threw "open the door to what could be the most competitive mayoral race in 20 years," the Star Tribune wrote at the time.

R.T. Rybak, mayor¹: The greatest professional job I could have is to serve my hometown. It's tough for me to walk away.

Cathy Wurzer, MPR News host²: [Rybak’s] consistent popularity may come less from his legacy of balancing budgets, promoting arts, and perking up development downtown, than from his reputation as a tireless cheerleader for the city and its people.

Betsy Hodges, candidate: R.T. was a great mayor. There are a lot of great things that R.T. did as mayor, and I was on the council for eight years of his time as mayor. He had had to tackle a number of difficulties that he did not anticipate. He’d sort of run on this platform of, “How can we brag about Minneapolis to the whole world?” He wanted to do his R.T. stuff. And he walks in, and he finds a terrible financial situation, including the closed pension funds and the increasing amount of pressure.

Cam Gordon, City Council member³: [The 2007 I-35W Bridge collapse] was a challenging time for anyone to be in public office, and I think he was an effective leader.

Hodges: There was a tornado and a bridge collapse when R.T. was mayor, I mean, he just had to deal with a lot of things that he didn’t anticipate having to deal with. And to his credit, he did a good job. He made sure the finances were well taken care of. The CFOs that he had were doing a good job, notably Pat Born, at the time. 

And he was doing it against the headwinds of the old guard, who did not like him. He had beaten Sharon Sayles Belton; he had beaten Peter McLaughlin. The old guard in Minneapolis really did not like him. They wanted their style of politics, and they wanted their policies to be prevailing. And with R.T., for the most part, they did not [get that]. 

David Schultz, Hamline University professor of political science and legal studies⁴: He hasn’t fundamentally changed police culture... he will be most known for the Vikings Stadium and other downtown developments.

Barb Johnson, City Council member⁵: Rybak really led us in a way to hold the line on spending, and that has produced a city that came out of the recession in way, way better shape than other cities across the country.

Curtis Gilbert, MPR News reporter: In 2013, you still have a majority on the City Council who represented the old-guard Minneapolis DFL, personified by Council President Barb Johnson. She took a more modest role in city government than the ascendent progressive wing. She'd say things like, "The city has a lot of important jobs to do: police, fire, building inspection, road construction." Like, we've got plenty to do. She was always trying to keep mission creep under control.

Naomi Kritzer, election guide author: It was a much more centrist-dominated period in city politics. When Mayor R.T. Rybak ran in 2001, he ran to the left of incumbent Sharon Sayles Belton. She was a big fan of the idea of a new Twins ballpark, and Rybak ran against spending public money on sports facilities, only to go ahead and build two of them as mayor. So I was personally feeling pretty cynical about the sorts of promises politicians make and how they end up governing. I think that was pretty common.

Rybak⁶: The only other thing I would ever run for is governor. But that would be many years down the road. [Three years earlier Rybak briefly ran for governor before withdrawing and endorsing Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who’d lose the 2010 DFL domination to future Gov. Mark Dayton.]

Hodges: So what happens is, R.T. is stepping down. He had run for governor unsuccessfully, but decided not to run for another term. It is an open seat, and a number of people dipped into the fray, some of whom had more or less ties to R.T., some with more or fewer ties to the old guard. And then there was me. And I ran explicitly and openly on a platform of racial equity. [It was] widely believed that I would not and could not win. I mean, very widely believed that I would not and could not win. Even before I started talking about racial equity. 

Cam Winton, candidate⁷: When Jackie Cherryhomes was on the City Council, the City Council racked up a lot of debt. Then along came Betsy [Hodges] and Don [Samuels], good folks, but they spent like sailors on shore leave, robbing taxpayers blind while spending money on things we didn't need and can't afford, and then, along comes Mark [Andrew]...

Mark Andrew, candidate⁸: I would [agree I'm the leading candidate]... I would say the old guard attacks [against me] would have some validity. 

Gilbert: Hodges was running as kind of an extension of the Rybak administration—kind of a progressive, but not as far left as some are now on the council. She was the standard bearer for the progressive wing; Mark Andrew was the standard bearer for the old-guard DFL.

Andrew: There were things in the city that I thought the then-mayor did a great job with. I thought he branded the city very beautifully; I think he did a lot on the promotion and cheerleading side. I think he was unparalleled. But I wanted, on policy matters, to take a different approach on a number of issues: community-based criminal justice was one of those, a much more aggressive stance on environmental issues was another one.

Hodges: Everybody thought that Mark Andrew was the frontrunner. And Mark’s a great guy, and Mark had been on the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners for many, many years, and since then he’d been doing a lot of great work. He was from southwest Minneapolis, and everybody knows that you need to win southwest Minneapolis to win the mayor’s race. I will say, everybody knows that, but not everybody acts like that.

Jackie Cherryhomes, candidate⁹: I have experience that no one else has; I have the executive experience of having run the city of Minneapolis.

Don Samuels, candidate¹⁰: I’m the No. 1 proponent for streetcars. I’ve been to Portland and saw them there. They are kind of small and friendly and they have this sense of dependability. They’re always driving down the same track. They’re also like trains. You lay down a track. It’s a commitment.

Cam Winton, candidate¹¹: In politics, if somebody flicks you in the arm, you break their nose.

Hodges¹²: You need to have the discernment and judgment to know when it’s time to build a relationship and when it’s time to fight and I’ve done that.

Andrew¹³: This is the linchpin of why I’m running for mayor. The modern mayor will use the mayor’s office for a platform upon which to create multidimensional partnerships… That’s my skill set, to do intra-jurisdictional partnerships.

Hodges: The activist left didn’t like R.T. They had not liked R.T., but they had not been able to beat him in three election cycles. There was a whole bunch of stuff that they wanted but they weren’t getting. And they couldn’t win citywide. And then here I come with a very progressive message, talking very openly about the issues they cared about, particularly racial equity, and they threw their lot in with mine. That was one of the key things that happened in 2013, and I would not have won without them. All credit goes to the organizing done by these activist left organizations that were willing to band together with each other, but also to support me. 

Schultz: We would have thought, at that point, the city was divided, but it was probably nowhere near the way it’s divided now, in terms of the polarization. Rybak managed to hold the city together during his terms in office. And by the time he was exiting his terms as mayor, we were really starting to see the division within the Democratic party: the early emergence of the more liberal wing versus the more centrist wing, which we still see now.

The Clown Car Filleth

An airport baggage handler who dropped an all-timer campaign video. A pirate who emerged from the Occupy movement (Captain Jack Sparrow), though don’t confuse him with another, non-pirate candidate running with the libertarian-adjacent Minnesota Pirate Party (Kurtis W. Hanna). A perennial right-wing candidate (Bob “Again” Carney Jr.), a candidate running under the “Lauraist Communist” banner (John Charles Wilson), and an independent conservative (Cam Winton)—the 2013 field of mayoral hopefuls had something for everyone. 

Thirty-five candidates would eventually pay the $20 fee to run for mayor, inspiring headlines from around the country, but only three longtime DFLers would crack the 10% first-place vote threshold: City Council Member Betsy Hodges, ex-Hennepin County Board of Commissioners Chair Mark Andrew, and City Council Member Don Samuels.

Lena Jones, Minneapolis Community and Technical College instructor¹⁴: You have almost 12 years of pent-up desire from folks who were reluctant to run because we had a very popular incumbent mayor. Once he announced he wasn’t going to run, the floodgates opened.

Casey Carl, city clerk¹⁵: Twenty bucks down and you too could be the mayor.

Naomi Kritzer, election guide author: I called it the clown car mayoral race, because it was the elective version of one of those circus acts where clown after clown after clown climbs out of a tiny little car. I've never actually seen that happen... It's still a good metaphor.

Larry Jacobs, University of Minnesota political science professor¹⁶: It is almost impossible, to be honest, for most voters to make sense of this many candidates. It’s just too many... Right now, it’s kind of like looking at a rugby scrum.

Curtis Gilbert, MPR News reporter: Oh, I mean, I loved covering that election. I have fond memories of all of those characters. This was the first time where you had an open seat, and it was just a free-for-all. One of the challenges was, because there's no primary, you can't have a debate with all 35 candidates on stage. You simply can't. So how do you choose who the real contenders are? It was really hard. One of our metrics was: Are you waging an actual campaign? Because there were some people who were running for the fun of it and because it was so cheap. [Laughs.] I think we ended up with eight leading candidates for mayor, which more or less reflected the vote totals. We had to come up with some kind of heuristics… It's an uncomfortable position for the media.  

Betsy Hodges, candidate: Some of them were a little bit humorous, right, like the guy that did the video walking—Jeff, who walked out of the lake in his online campaign ad. Captain Jack Sparrow was running, and there was someone from the Pirate Party running, so there were two pirates running for mayor.

Jeffrey Wagner, candidate, in his famous and/or infamous campaign ad: I am cool with making $100,000 a year... I will not even go to the strip clubs ANYMORE... wake the fuck up!"

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post reporter, awarding Wagner the "The worst ad of 2013"¹⁷: Amazing(ly) bad.

Abby D. Phillip, ABC News reporter¹⁸: This might be the best political ad of the year.

Jeffrey Wagner, candidate¹⁹: I look at Minneapolis lakes, sir, as the residence and the sharks are in the water and I want to protect the Minneapolis residents from the sharks in the water. The sharks are the corrupt politicians… Dude, I’m not a politician and I’m way over my head.

Gilbert: It's very funny. It might've gotten on The Daily Show. Captain Jack Sparrow and Bob "Again" Carney would hold this thing they called the Mayoral Council. And that guy who made the video showed up and he was, at one point, wearing a Speedo-type bathing suit. There were a lot of costumes... a lot of costumes at those press conferences. 

Bob "Again" Carney, Jr., perennial Republican candidate (including in this year's Ward 13 City Council race): My second paid job in politics was as an intern at Congressman Bill Frenzel's Washington, D.C., office for three months. I became extremely disillusioned with the entire political system. My next job was as a janitor, which was a higher hourly rate and I was actually doing something useful for the first time. My first political race was in either 2009 or 2013... I think I ran for some stuff before then, I don't even remember.

Kurtis Hanna, candidate: It was a wacky time, I would agree. But the wackiest part of the whole experience was after we had all filed for office, a gentleman who had changed his name legally to Captain Jack Sparrow, and regularly dressed like a pirate, ended up also running for office. It was completely surreal. 

Cam Winton, candidate²⁰: Hey, [Captain Jack] is the only one with 100 percent name recognition. I have to admire his commitment. Even at the State Fair, when it was so hot, he was wearing his full pirate costume.

David Schultz, Hamline University professor of political science and legal studies: He was a very colorful candidate, he truly was. And of all the nontraditional candidates, he seemed to get the most buzz in terms of going from fringe to somewhat mainstream media.

Captain Jack Sparrow, candidate: I was involved with an organization called Occupy. Remember that? We had done demonstrations dressed as pirates; that was just a costume that was easy to get at the time. I was arrested at one demonstration, so I decided it'd be fun to go to court as Captain Jack Sparrow. Bob "Again" suggested I run for office in 2013. I didn't think I had much of a chance of winning, but I wanted to draw attention to some of the issues I'm interested in, like a basic income guarantee and ending homelessness. I’d never run for office, but of course I've been involved in various political activities over the years, starting with the food co-ops in the 1970s. I’m a radical centrist. 

Carney, Jr.: I was very impressed with Captain Jack's intellect and his dedication toward reforms. We both made major contributions to recruiting additional candidates into the race. Our goal was to get a broad range of citizens who'd raise issues that were unique to them. I think we were pretty successful.

Mark Andrew, candidate: The idea was to be civilized, and so everybody looked like the same—homogenized, left-of-center Democrat—except for the theatrical people. And they distracted in other ways, because the newspapers—there are only so many column inches dedicated to the mayor’s race, and they were occupying a fair amount of that.

Hanna: I wasn't running to win; I was running as a Ron Paul Republican in the heart of Minneapolis. I had connected with some Occupy Minnesota people, and thought there should be more participation in the political process. We were inspired by the Pirate Party. We actually got a slate of Pirates trying to take over the Minneapolis political ship, if you will. We just wanted to get political concepts out there—Occupy people and Ron Paul people getting together, discussing how the world should be. I don’t think I spent any money whatsoever.  

Gilbert: Dan Cohen self-funded his campaign. He was in the Minneapolis City Council in the 1970s, and his main claim to fame is he sued the Star Tribune in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And he won. He had been an unnamed source who was working for some candidate, had given some documents to the Star Tribune anonymously, and they outed him. It's a Supreme Court precedent that's probably taught in media law courses: Don't burn your unnamed sources, they can sue you for that. He hated the Star Tribune, obviously, and he said he was spending the money he won in his judgment to run for mayor. He would show up to the Mayoral Council events, even though he was included in a number of debates and was sort of seen as a higher tier of candidate; they were having a lot of fun. He was kind of a character. 

Dan Cohen, candidate²¹: Everyone has heard all of my jokes. We have not gotten to the point where there have been many surprises or any rough-and-ready debate.

Andrew: It was really a two-person race, the other people in it were not serious candidates. And in fact, a couple of the other leading, more credible candidates, I can’t even remember their names. Isn’t that awful?

Hodges: There were aspects of spectacle around it, but at the heart of it, there were a number of people genuinely vying to be mayor of Minneapolis.

Schultz: You know, it’s kind of Andy Warholian, trying to get the 15 minutes of fame. Some of them, no doubt, were very serious. But I think for some of them it really was that novelty. “Why’d you run for mayor?” “Because I could!”

Carney, Jr.: Originally, we were being referred to as "the clown car." I think we did a lot in paving the way for people presenting alternative ideas and being listened to. I believe I have a solution to global warming, so I plan to be educating people on that. I need to run for governor next time around.

Captain Jack: I got tons of press. Probably more than any other candidate. It was hard, but it was fun. It was fun enough that I did it again in 2017.

Kritzer: I got a lot more readers that year because people would google the names of the obscure candidates, and my blog got a lot of hits. I felt less of a responsibility, because I had fewer [election guide] readers, and I felt much more empowered to just make fun of people. 

The First True Test of Ranked-Choice Voting

In 2006, Minneapolis voters approved the adoption of ranked-choice voting (aka instant-runoff voting). The ballot process—which advocates say gives voters more choice, while detractors say it baffles them—debuted in 2009, though it didn't really matter in the mayoral contest; incumbent R.T. Rybak ran away with 73.6% of first-choice votes that year. Thus, the avalanche of '13 candidates put Minneapolis's newish voting system to its first real test. 

Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota²²: It's probably one of the biggest races ranked-choice voting has seen in this country in terms of a competitive race.

Lynne Bolton, Jackie Cherryhomes campaign manager²³: We don’t have the negative ads to say, “This person is horrible, so vote for my guy.” We’re used to the system where you have two choices, and one is bad and the other is good… My guess is the next mayoral election will be easier.

Betsy Hodges, candidate: In 2013, there wasn’t a frontrunner, and I certainly wasn’t considered one of them. And so there was a lot of collegiality among, you know, Jackie Cherryhomes and I—we were very friendly afterwards … We’d talk about what it’s like to be a woman on the campaign in 2013, because she and I were two of the more prominent women who were running.

Mark Andrew, candidate²⁴: It’s an unnatural act for a politician to ask to be somebody’s second choice.

Hodges: [Andrew’s campaign] really did not have a good enough strategy for ranked-choice voting and how it works. Mark was literally telling his supporters to bullet ballot, meaning just vote for him, first choice, and leave the rest blank. We heard tell of that, I don’t know what story he would tell.

Andrew: [The size of the field was] a severe distraction. Not to trash-talk ranked-choice voting, which I’m still waiting to see deliver on its promises, but it became impossible to get messages out there with so many people running. That’s one of the inherent problems with ranked-choice, is you only get a few cracks at the bat. 

Devin Rice, member of the Minneapolis Charter Commission²⁵: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended poll taxes and literacy tests. In some ways, I will argue that this ranked-choice voting ballot may be more complicated for some than a literacy test.

Patrick O'Connor, interim Minneapolis elections director²⁶: After the successful 2009 implementation, I called that process one of the most significant civic exercises in Minnesota history. I still believe that, and I'm excited to see RCV contribute to a more civil, substantive, and inclusive mayoral race this year.

David Schultz, Hamline University professor of political science and legal studies: I can remember being on panels on Almanac, and all the other political scientists on there were totally opposed to ranked-choice voting—terrible idea, horrible idea, it’ll cause voter confusion, voters won’t be able to keep track of all the information. I remember being the sole political scientist who said, “You know, the evidence from other countries is that voters are able to figure it out there … are American voters dumber than voters in other countries, that they can’t figure out how to do this?” I said, “It’s worth an experiment.”

Katherine Milton, voter²⁷: It’s like mayor soup. It’s like putting together a 5,000-piece puzzle.

Carl Goldstein, voter²⁸: I’m a little confused by it. I think in theory it’s a good method, but I don’t know.

Darryl Merwin, voter²⁹: I miss being able to vote for one guy or one gal. I have no idea if I did it right.

Connie Eiden, voter³⁰: I liked it. It was easier than I thought it would be. There were a lot of opportunities to have it explained as long as you were paying attention.

Hodges: You just didn’t need to have a ranked-choice strategy in 2009, but I knew a lot about ranked-choice voting because I helped bring it to the city. I had run under it in 2009 myself as a council member, and I believe in ranked-choice voting to this day.

Kurtis Hanna, candidate: It was hilarious to see like 30 names listed three different times, so you've got 90 different things on the ballot just for one race.

Hodges: Just for the record, there were 36 mayoral forums in 2013. And there were that many in 2017 as well, thank you very much. I have done 72 mayoral forums—I kept track. Every organization did it differently, but there were usually at least five of us. It was usually me, Mark Andrew, Jackie Cherryhomes, Don Samuels, and Cam Winton. Sometimes they’d have more or fewer, depending on the organization and who they thought was good. There might be an organization that was good on transit, and so they would have Bob Carney there. But there were usually just five of us.

Gilbert: I recorded this fun moment at the end of the last debate [between Cam Winton, Stephanie Woodruff, Mark Andrew, Betsy Hodges, Don Samuels, Jackie Cherryhomes, Bob Fine, and Dan Cohen]. At the end, I think it was Don Samuels who probably got it going, they all started singing "Kumbaya" with their arms around each other. [Veteran newspaper columnist] Nick Coleman thought it was outrageous. MPR has been periodically asked to license that recording, because it's just such an unusual thing to happen in an intense mayoral election. There were a lot of media stunts.

Schultz: There are some who argue that [ranked-choice voting] promotes more civility, that it’s kind of hard to badmouth your opponent and then ask for voters to make you their second choice. Again, evidence is, based on what we’ve seen nationally, ambiguous on that one. Some people are saying it’s prevented Minneapolis races from degenerating into really ugly politics; I’m not sure I buy that argument. 

Naomi Kritzer, election guide author: We're still sort of figuring it out, honestly. That year a lot of people didn't understand it, although it's fairly intuitive. The funniest part of that year was when they had to count by hand, because they didn't have an approved automated system yet. It took soooo long, it took days.

Gilbert: They laboriously counted those ballots by hand. It was very inefficient. 

Schultz: Is ranked-choice voting a success? I’d put it as a question mark. We just don’t know. That would be the political science answer. We have too little data to reach any type of conclusion. Lots of people are trying to, for a variety of reasons, reach their own conclusions, because they either like ranked-choice voting or dislike it. But in terms of being able to reach any hard conclusions, it’s mixed at best.

Hodges: The old guard, to this day, doesn’t like ranked-choice voting.

Schultz: We can’t show that it has necessarily increased voter turnout, we can’t show that it has made things more civil. Can we show that it’s increased the range of choices? Maybe. But then, Minneapolis cut back on ballot access. Has it, which is the other argument, produced more moderate candidates? Again, there’s no evidence on that. 

A Hodges Victory and Its Lessons

Two days after Minneapolis voters headed to the polls, Hodges was declared the 47th mayor of Minneapolis—in the 33rd round of counting. She took home 48.95 percent of the vote, while Andrew, her closest competitor, ended up with 31.44 percent. She would go on to serve for one term before losing to current Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in 2017, making her only the second mayor in 40 years to run for a second term in the city and lose.

“I got so much done. I got so much policy passed, I got really good budgets passed. I embedded some key racial equity things that it took a long time for Jacob to undo,” she says today, reflecting on her term. “We got the 20-year parks and streets agreement; we raised the minimum wage; everybody got earned sick and safe time in Minneapolis—not just city workers, every worker in Minneapolis got sick and safe time.” 

Betsy Hodges, mayor elect, on election night³¹: Mr. Mayor, I want you to know that I am well aware that you are [still] the mayor. I don't think it's a question tonight whether or not I am going to be crowd surfing. But R.T., please know that is your signature, and I am not going to forge your signature.

R.T. Rybak, outgoing mayor, on election night³²: Mayor-elect Hodges and I have shared a lot of work together on tough issues together, but we're very different people. And I think that's a good thing.

Casey Carl, city clerk, on election night³³: Right now, of course, people are saying, “When am I going to know who the mayor is?” And I respect the fact that people want answers quickly. But I hope they respect that we want accurate results.

Mark Andrew, candidate: I was on pins and needles. There were three different polls that I was aware of. One was our poll, which, two weeks before the election, had us up, like, 12 points.

Hodges: We had over 1,000 volunteers on our campaign. Our campaign was based on field. The first staffer we hired, besides the campaign manager, we hired five field staff in February of 2013. We didn’t hire anybody else until later that summer. All they did was field work: calling people and having conversations.

David Schultz, Hamline University professor of political science and legal studies: Hodges ran on, either explicitly or implicitly, generational change. She was the candidate of the new generation, running against the establishment, trying to recruit younger voters to say, basically, “This is our party. This is the DFL party that you’re a member of, Andrew represents the old DFL.” She really energized a younger group of voters that had felt, I think, alienated from the Minneapolis political process for a while.

Hodges: The average call on the Hodges campaign in 2013 was nine minutes long. That is outrageously long. And we had tens of thousands of those conversations. That’s what my campaign was, all based on this message [of belonging and racial equity]. And the activist left was a huge part of that. They brought volunteers, they brought resources, people doorknocked, they did all the stuff. And then we won.

Andrew: What it really got down to, honestly, was the left ended up supporting her more than they did me. Which is interesting, because I was easily the most progressive of the legitimate candidates running.

Curtis Gilbert, MPR News reporter: In general, a good time was had by all. Mark Andrew was still pretty salty about it, if I recall correctly. I think he felt kind of rejected by, ya know, his DFL people. At one point he was seen as very progressive, and probably was very progressive, but he was kind of put in the bucket of the old guard. 

Hodges: Many people will corroborate what I’m about to tell you. I knew I was going to win before I announced. I just knew. I knew R.T. was not going to run, which was an open question at the time, and I knew that I was gonna run and I was gonna win. I knew, like, in my bones. 

Andrew: The one tactical mistake that the Mark Andrew campaign made—which I disagreed with, but I’d turned the day-to-day operations over to my campaign manager and my staff—is they ran a base campaign. Which means, let’s pull out all the proven voters, people who voted in primaries and generals going back 20 years. They said, “All you need to do is pull out the base.” … I would have done a lot more focusing on first-time and second-time voters. I would have really gone after the Obama voters harder than my campaign did. I think that was a big mistake. 

Schultz: Andrew ran as if he was the incumbent, heir to the throne—not in an arrogant way, but basically, he was like, “Well, it’s my turn now, the establishment has picked me, I’m gonna be the next mayor.” Hodges introduced a whole bunch of different tactics, mobilized new voices, and took advantage of ranked-choice voting very, very well.

Hodges: In the end I won by 18 points on a campaign that was about belonging and about making sure no one was being judged or blamed for the problems we had, but that we were all invited into the solutions for the problems we had as Minneapolis. A campaign that was honest about the fact that Minneapolis is an extraordinary place, and it’s also a place deeply challenged by race—more so than other places in this country, actually. That all remains true.

Captain Jack Sparrow, candidate: I thought [Hodges] did OK. I thought she did pretty good as mayor, too. I got to be pretty good friends with her. I guess she had my picture in her office for a while. 

Naomi Kritzer, election guide author: [Hodges] was my first choice. She remained my first choice in 2017. She did a pretty good job. A friend of mine described her as what you get when you have a progressive mayor and a conservative-leaning City Council. I thought a lot of the campaigning against her in 2017 boiled down to misogyny, and I think she would have been a better mayor in 2020 than we got from Jacob Frey. I liked her, and I've missed her pretty regularly in the years since she was defeated by Frey. 

Gilbert: It was a transition year. Hodges ushered in something that became really central to the city's thinking since then: the word equity. The first time I remember hearing Minnesota politicians talking about the concept of equity, and building city policy around that, was Betsy Hodges. It's not like she invented it, but she really introduced that to Minneapolis. And that's a legacy that I'm pretty sure continues to today.

Hodges: I think the lesson that the old guard learned from 2013 was they needed to be more organized, they needed to have a stronger message—they generally choose the message of fear—and that they needed to pour a lot of money into the mayor’s race in order to win. Those were the lessons they learned, and that has been their gameplan ever since, in 2017, in 2021, and, I assume, in 2025. 

I think the conclusion [the activist left] drew was, “We have cracked the code. We know how to win citywide. If we come together and we organize in this way, we’re the ones who did it. Betsy Hodges won because of us.” And it is true that they were necessary, but they were not sufficient. Because what I brought to the table was years and years and years of loving and building relationships with and leading white people in southwest Minneapolis in a way that meant they would follow me. In Minneapolis, if you do not have a message and if you do not have a relationship with the white voters of southwest Minneapolis, you just don’t win citywide. 

Kritzer: Oh, the legacy of the 2013 election is that they raised the price to file for the mayor's race. [Laughs.] You need to create a little more of a barrier than the money someone would spend on a pizza. That, I think, is the true legacy—a barrier one needs to jump over rather than step over to get on the ballot.