When the final votes rolled in for the St. Paul mayor’s race, even some of Kaohly Her’s supporters seemed taken aback that she had unseated Melvin Carter, who had handily won his last two elections.
“It seems like nobody expected me to win, except me,” said Her on Wednesday, the day after a hard-fought election that unfolded in just a matter of weeks.
Her, who announced her candidacy in early August, said she had no time or money to conduct formal polling during the campaign, but it became clear to her she had the advantage when she hired a campaign manager before Carter did.
“We were talking with the same person,” said Her, who said she found that the mayor had done little in the way of door knocking until she entered the race.
Aggressive campaigner
Between Aug. 4, when she officially entered the five-way mayor’s race, and Nov. 4, when she won it, Her engaged Carter and his three other challengers in a dozen debate-style mayoral forums, quickly establishing herself as the mayor’s most aggressive and vocal critic on the campaign trail.
The backdrop of sluggish or faltering economic development — a shuttered CVS store at Snelling and University avenues, a shuttered Cub Foods grocery in the Midway, a shuttered Lunds grocery downtown — did the mayor no favors, and seemed to underscore accusations from the Chamber of Commerce, among others, that the city had stagnated, especially downtown.
Among Her’s criticisms, she said the mayor had let relationships falter with state lawmakers and other key partners, and he lacked transparency and responsiveness in his dealings with neighborhood groups, making decisions with minimal input.
Community frustrations
On the Sunday before the election, Meg Duhr — president of the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation — took to Facebook to post a scathing critique of the mayor’s decision to install a maintenance depot and refueling site off West Seventh and Randolph avenues to serve FCC trash trucks involved in citywide garbage collection.
“I don’t actually blame Melvin for crime, vacant buildings, and an empty downtown. I understand the larger forces beyond his control,” Duhr wrote. “What I do blame him for is failing to listen to and respect the communities he is supposed to represent and for consistently using backdoor workarounds to the public process to get his way.”
“It’s not so much what he does, it’s how he does it,” she wrote, listing “emergency vetoes … sending his city attorneys to force our council member to recuse herself before a critical vote, asking his staff to manipulate the rankings of street projects for the Common Cent fund. I could go on.”
“In May, he promised to meet with the community right away to discuss a community benefits agreement between the city, FCC, and the community,” Duhr said. “But it took us four months of reminders and cajoling to get that scheduled and then we just got 30 minutes of his time.”
Election Night
On Election Night, Carter — a two-term incumbent — garnered about 41% of the vote on the first ballot, outpacing Her’s 38% by more than 1,700 votes. Still, about 60% of the city had voted for someone other than either candidate.
When ballots from challengers Yan Chen, Mike Hilborn and Adam Dullinger were redistributed, Her’s political fortunes rose by 10 percentage points, giving her the ultimate lead of 1,877 votes. She won with 48% of the vote, over Carter’s 45%.
Her, a state representative for House District 64A centered around Summit Avenue and Griggs Street, has been more gracious in victory, thanking Carter on Election Night for introducing her to public service. In 2018, early in his first term, she had served as the mayor’s policy director before stepping down to focus on her role as a state lawmaker.
Now, with the election behind her, comes the challenge of leading a city where rising property taxes have, in the eyes of many, outpaced the quality of city services and the upkeep of key business corridors, from Snelling and University avenues to much of downtown.
“We have a transition team that we have to put together,” Her said. “We have to look at how we’re going to move forward … and then all the relationships we need to build and the partners we need to meet with.”
On Wednesday Carter posted a social media post from 2023 in which he said “Heard somebody say #SaintPaul should #elect a woman as mayor and they might have been trying to insult me but that actually sounds cool.”
He added the comment “It still sounds nice. Good luck, Rep. Her.”
Shake-up of department leaders?
Her on Wednesday answered questions during a brisk walk from her Hamline Avenue campaign headquarters to a Charles Avenue playground, where she posed for pictures between media interviews.
On department leaders — does she plan to replace the city’s top staff:
“I would say that it’s not necessarily that I’m looking at ‘new.’ It’s that I need to do an evaluation,” she said. “We really have to if we want to move our city into looking at core city services. It would really require us to do an assessment.”
On the mayor’s recently-proposed, four-part gun control ordinance, which she once called “performative?:
“If the momentum has already moved forward with that, I don’t see a reason to undo that work. … I just need to make sure I understand where we are with that process.”
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On college savings accounts for newborns, another signature Carter initiative:
“I don’t have any plans to be getting rid of things. I like to be really thorough and detailed, which means that assessments really matter. I do really need to come in and take a look at where we are and how sustainable the program is before I can make any kind of decision about what’s going to happen with some of these things that have already been (established).”
On the proposed Summit Avenue bike trail and the downtown Mississippi River promenade, two initiatives she had called ripe for re-evaluation but not necessarily cancellation:
“Somebody actually said to me, ‘Now that the election is over, how do you really feel?’ No, I feel the same way. … I think that when people come in and they think they know everything or they have all the ideas or they have all the right answers is where they usually go wrong. I don’t know everything, and so I have to come in and review and be diligent and make good decisions based on what I’m finding. That really is always the foundation when I look at something if I’m going to do it or not.”
