Once again, it is time for residents across St. Paul and Minneapolis to head to the voting booth — this time to elect a new mayor for their respective cities. This mayoral election has five candidates for St. Paul and six for Minneapolis. Each of these candidates has different views, reasons for running, and top issues, which are important when determining who you will vote for.
As election day approaches for both cities, many residents of the cities are left with the same questions we experience every election season: “Who do we vote for?” and “How will they address the issues I care about?”
Most candidates have campaign websites that residents can visit to learn which issues each candidate is passionate about and what they stand for. These websites are crucial when it comes to researching your candidates.
While some people will say that it is not important to research who is running for mayor and they’ll just decide at the booth, I respectfully disagree. When it comes to any type of election, it is always a great idea to research the candidates before you make your way to the voting booth, as by doing your research, you can figure out which candidate aligns with your own personal views on the current issues that they all mention within their campaigns.
Within these mayoral races, each city will have its own important issues like reviving downtown in St. Paul or police reform policing reforms in the recently abandoned federal consent decree against the Minneapolis Police Department. A helpful resource to help you find candidates who care about the same issues as you is the Meet Your Mayor quizzes from Sahan Journal. Here are the quizzes for both St. Paul and Minneapolis residents, and they can help you find candidates you mostly align with.
While this coming election determines who the mayor of each city will be, there will be other items on the ballot. For Minneapolis, residents will be able to vote on City Council, the Board of Estimate and Taxation and Park Board candidates, while on the St. Paul ballot, residents will be asked to vote on a Referendum on Ordinance 25-2 amending the City Charter and Approval of New School District Referendum Revenue Authorization.
I would like to emphasize that the point of this article is not to persuade anyone to vote for a specific candidate, but to reiterate the importance of not only your vote, but also in researching the candidates.
The reason I keep reiterating this point is that another reason people do not research the candidates is that they choose not to vote in the elections, which I think is crazy, honestly. I have talked about this in a previous article about voting during the presidential election, but it rings true for every election. By not voting at all, it essentially counts like you vote no against any of the candidates or the other questions on the ballot, which is why everyone’s vote is important and should be voted.
With all that being said, if you take away anything from this article, I hope that it is the knowledge that your vote has a weight and an impact that could help better not only the cities we live in, but also in any other elections in the future. So the next time you are able to vote in the election, just remember researching your candidates does not hurt and that your vote has an impact.
