What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, Minneapolis voters have a chance to drastically alter city government at the ballot box today.

First, they will choose to reelect or oust Mayor Jacob Frey, who was criticized for not doing more to reform the police both before and after Floyd’s murder. Two progressives, community organizer Sheila Nezhad and former state Rep. Kate Knuth, are running against him in the ranked-choice election, and each has urged her supporters to rank the other second and “don’t rank Frey” to maximize the incumbent’s chances of losing.

Nezhad and Knuth are also strong supporters of City Question 2, a local ballot measure that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety that would focus more on social services and report to the City Council. However, another local ballot measure, City Question 1, would undermine that by giving the next mayor — be it Frey or one of his opponents — a lot more power vis-a-vis the council in the future.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire structure of city government, especially with regard to public safety, could change in Minneapolis today, along with the people who make up that government.

Police reform by city charter amendment is on the ballot in both Minneapolis and Cleveland. These proposals are very different from one another but have very similar goals — namely to make police officers more accountable to someone other than the police department itself.

The Cleveland amendment, Issue 24, would create a civilian-led police commission (required to broadly represent the “racial, social, economic, and cultural interests” of the city) that would have the power to direct investigations of officers and serve as the final word on whether disciplinary action against an officer is sufficient.

In Minneapolis, meanwhile, City Question 2 would shift the balance of power over law enforcement away from the police chief and mayor and toward the City Council, while also creating a new Department of Public Safety that would employ police officers as well as alternative safety responders, such as social workers and violence interrupters.

Both of these amendments are divisive, with the Minneapolis proposal frequently being framed as defunding or disbanding the police entirely, something it does not do. But supporters say the amendments are critical to changing the culture of policing in these Midwest cities, where the police departments in question have both been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent years.

Interestingly, another police-related ballot measure in Austin combines proposals that are frequently tied to reform — additional training hours and mandatory community engagement time — with a minimum police staffing requirement. Staffing requirements are issues that have been championed by police unions in the past, and the Minneapolis question would actually eliminate that city’s staffing minimums that have been in place since 1961.

Micah, there’s a 2007 study from the “Journal of Politics” that analyzed weather patterns and turnout rates per county over 14 presidential elections and concluded that every inch of rain above the historical average for that date reduced turnout by around 1 percent. But there are good reasons to be skeptical such a result would still hold today, given the shifts in the political landscape and voter behavior over the last 14 years. The study’s authors actually excluded Oregon’s 2000 election results from their dataset because the state had implemented its first in the nation vote-by-mail scheme. Now that vote-by-mail is ubiquitous, the study’s results may be on even less firm footing.