With all precincts reporting late Tuesday evening, female candidates are leading in the count for—and indeed appear to have won—all seven of the seats on the city council of Saint Paul, Minnesota.
In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, a number of observers noted the real possibility that Saint Paul residents would elect seven women to the Council, and the current results published on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website suggest that it has indeed come to pass.
Only three of the seven incumbent members of the Council ran for re-election, and current results have them all winning easily: Rebecca Noecker in Ward 2, Mitra Jalali in Ward 4, and Nelsie Yang in Ward 6. In the remaining seats, Hwa Jeong Kim appears to have achieved a majority in Ward 5, and Saura Jost is inches away from one in Ward 3.
Jost and the remaining two leaders in the count—Anika Bowie in Ward 1 and Cheniqua Johnson in Ward 7—will need to sweat out some instant-runoff rounds over the next few days under the city’s ranked-choice election process, but all three of them are either close enough to 50% or far enough ahead of their nearest competition that all appear to be strong favorites. (And meanwhile, even if Johnson were to fall behind her closest competitor in Ward 7, that’s Pa Der Vang, who would not break up an all-female City Council.)
It should be noted that these races have little to no partisan valence; all of the plausible candidates for these seats are Democrats, given the entirely moribund status of the Republican Party within the city.
The new City Council will be greeted by an incumbent (and, uh, male) mayor, Melvin Carter, who was elected in 2017 (and re-elected in ’21) as the first African-American mayor in the city’s history.
I don’t think this news quite measures up to the victories that progressives won in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and New Jersey on Tuesday night, but it’s still exciting for us in the Twin Cities.