Here’s what I’m looking for when results start coming in tonight, for the RCV mayor’s race. Let me know why I’m dead wrong!

1) Can Frey top 50% in round 1? If he does, it’s over.
2) Is Frey below 40%? If so, really tough path for him.
3) In between, things get interesting…
The general dynamic of the race is Frey vs. the field. Most voters either support the mayor, or oppose him. RCV means anti-Frey voters can scatter their first-choice votes and still come home.
Anti-Frey activists are pushing the “Don’t rank Frey” campaign to minimize the number of voters Frey picks up in later rounds. But plenty of voters probably WILL rank Frey 2nd or 3rd! Not a lot, but certainly not nothing. If Frey’s at 47%+ in the first round, I think he wins easy
Other voters might only rank 1 or two candidates, which means their votes are exhausted. And in Minneapolis’ RCV, you only need 50%+1 of *non-exhausted votes*.
The interesting scenario is if Frey’s in the low 40s for 1st-choice balloting. That’s when things could go either way. If he gets more 2nd choice votes than people expect, or lots of anti-Frey voters exhaust their ballots, he can win. If the anti-Frey vote consolidates, he loses.
The conventional wisdom is that the top 2 will come down to Frey and Nezhad.

If this is true — who knows! — and Knuth is the 3rd-ranked candidate, how her voters break may decide things.
Knuth and Nezhad (and perhaps Awed) have their own little mini-race going on to be favored anti-Frey candidate. Whichever maxes out first-choice votes is likely to be that person, unless voters for minor candidates overwhelmingly consolidate behind one of the major candidates.
2017 was a *much* more wide-open race, though. Lots more fluidity between candidates and opportunities for votes to consolidate in later rounds.

2021 is more of a “Frey vs. the field” dynamic.

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More from @dhmontgomery

3 Nov
In huge swathes of northern and western Minneapolis, Jacob Frey won outright majorities of the first-choice vote today (though no one topped 65% in any precinct). Sheila Nezhad had her strongholds in Phillips / Powderhorn / University. Knuth did OK almost everywhere.
Support for replacing the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety was strong in the same areas Frey did poorly in — Phillips / Powderhorn / University — and weak elsewhere, especially in Southwest Minneapolis.
Votes for Frey and against the Public Safety Department were *highly* correlated at the precinct level.
Read 5 tweets
3 Nov
Alright, let’s try this again, but with correct math.

I’d say Frey might be in trouble if the share of voters ranking in 2nd & 3rd was circa 1-3%. As it is, he’s got a whole lot of votes that will likely come his way as RCV is calculated and candidates eliminated tomorrow.
Frey’s got a whole lot of paths to get to 50%+1 as RCV is calculated. Is it mathematically guaranteed with what we know now? No. There are ways that both Nezhad & Knuth could theoretically win. But I think they’re unlikely.
As I think about it more closely, these old charts weren’t *wrong*. What they were showing is % of *total ballots cast*. My new charts are showing percent of ballots *in each round*. Exhausted ballots change the denominators!
Read 4 tweets
2 Nov
One thing that is certain to be true: the dominant choice of Minneapolis voters today is going to be “did not vote,” not any of the candidates/choices on the ballot. Since the 70s, Minneapolis has never had a municipal race where more than 50% of registered voters turned out.
And even if we do set a modern record and top 50% turnout, more registered voters will have stayed home than will vote for any of the candidates/choices.
Here’s a turnout history for Minneapolis mayoral elections. Note that 1985, 1989, 2005 and 2009 featured incumbent mayors winning reelection en route to long tenures. (Winning handily, in @R_T_Rybak’s cases; I can’t find stats on Donald Fraser’s 1980s wins to say for sure.)
Read 4 tweets
2 Nov
I’ll start today’s #COVID19 update with the good news: look at booster shots go!
There’s also an increase in first doses among 12- to 15-year-olds, but it’s pretty small compared to past rates they’ve shown. (About 59% of this group has at least 1 dose.)
So, that’s the good news.

The bad news is everything else. Our latest surge continues, with cases and positivity rates both continuing to rise:
Read 9 tweets
1 Nov
Today @mnhealth is adding data on #COVID19 reinfections for the first time. These have been tracked, but not reported as new cases because each “case” was a person, not an infection.

The upshot: ~8,000 new “cases.”

The true number of actually new cases is 2,857, not 8,184.
@mnhealth These are people who had COVID more than once.

This is distinct from people who had COVID after getting vaccinated, which is a “breakthrough infection,” not a “reinfection.”
@mnhealth Even filtering out all these backdated reinfection cases, the news today isn’t great. Our positivity rate is back over 7%, everything still trending upwards.
Read 8 tweets
29 Oct
Minnesota has closed out an all-around bad week of #COVID19 on a sour note. From Monday through today, our positivity rate rose by 0.7 percentage points, almost erasing last week’s 0.9-point fall. Cases also on the rise.
One week ago, people gave me a bunch of crap for qualifying that week’s decline by saying “the only question is how long it will last.”

I wish I hadn’t been proven right so quickly…
Now, this week’s uptick does not mean cases will continue to RISE indefinitely. It’s entirely possible we’ll get right back to declines next week. The point is, we don’t know the future!
Read 9 tweets

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