MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey defeated democratic socialist Omar Fateh and 13 other challengers Wednesday during the final round of counting in the city’s ranked-choice voting election.

Frey, who secured a third term, led Fateh by about 10 percentage points after Tuesday night’s first round of counting but didn’t cross the 50%-plus-one-vote threshold he needed to win outright.

The way ranked-choice voting works in Minneapolis, if no candidate clears the threshold in the first round, candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated for the next round of counting, while second- and third-choice rankings are allocated to the surviving candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate has enough. Frey won after the second round in 2021.

Frey, a mainstream Democrat, and Fateh, a Democratic state senator who is a democratic socialist, led a 15-candidate field. The only other candidates drawing significant votes were the Rev. DeWayne Davis and businessman Jazz Hampton, who were further back.

Fateh, Davis and Hampton formed an alliance, urging their voters to rank one another, but not Frey, to make it harder for the incumbent to win.

Frey led Minneapolis through the turmoil following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white officer used his knee to pin his neck to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes. But his administration later negotiated agreements with the state and federal governments to remake a police department that lost hundreds of officers after Floyd’s death.

Fateh was hoping to become the first Muslim and first Somali American mayor of the city, which has the largest Somali population in the U.S. He drew comparisons with Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who won New York City’s mayoral race on Tuesday, because of their backgrounds and ideological similarities. Both come from immigrant families, although Fateh was born in the U.S.

Election officials said Minneapolis set a record for the most votes cast in a municipal election, with more than 147,000 residents voting. They said 55% of registered voters turned out, up slightly from the previous record of 54% in 2021. The City Council is scheduled to certify the final results and make them official on Monday.

In neighboring St. Paul, Democratic state Rep. Kaohly Her defeated incumbent Democratic Mayor Melvin Carter early Wednesday after trailing slightly in the first round of counting there. Her will become the first woman and first Hmong American mayor of the state’s capital city, which has the largest Hmong population in the U.S.

She will be working with an all-female City Council.

NEW YORK — Their chances of becoming the next mayor of New York City may have dimmed. Their mission now? Stopping former Gov. Andrew Cuomo from getting to City Hall.

In the final day of campaigning before the city’s Democratic primary, candidates who are seen as long shots to win the nomination were urging voters to leave Cuomo off their ballots in the city’s ranked choice election in a last-ditch effort to block the former governor’s comeback from a sexual harassment scandal.

“Let’s make sure Andrew Cuomo gets nowhere near City Hall,” candidate and city Comptroller Brad Lander said Monday on WNYC radio, which interviewed the major candidates ahead of the election.

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, another candidate, similarly asked voters to not vote for Cuomo, telling the station, “We need fresh leadership, we need to turn the page and we need bold solutions at this moment.”

The pitches came as Cuomo, who has been considered the frontrunner for months, has also been trying to fend off a charge from Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, would be the city’s first Muslim and first Indian-American mayor if elected. A democratic socialist who got elected to the Legislature in 2020, Mamdani started the campaign as a relative unknown but has won support with a energetic campaign centered on improving the cost of living.

The assault on Cuomo from fellow members of the Democratic field comes as he has continued to rack up establishment endorsements. Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Cuomo on Sunday, saying voters should not “underestimate the complexity” for the challenges faced by a mayor. The New York Times didn’t issue an endorsement this year, but wrote an editorial praising Lander and saying Cuomo would be a better choice than Mamdani, who it said was unworthy of being on people’s ballots.

Cuomo and Mamdani have ratcheted up attacks on each other in the campaign’s final days.

“He’s about public relations,” Cuomo said of Mamdani, dismissing his opponent as too focused on looking great on social media, and not skilled enough as an executive to run the city.

Mamdani, meanwhile, exuded confidence, telling WNYC he is “one day from toppling a political dynasty.”

“New Yorkers are done with the cynical politics of the past. They want a future they can afford,” said Mamdani, who was endorsed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In a way, Mamdani and Cuomo represent the Democratic Party’s ideological divides, with Cuomo as an older moderate and Mamdani a younger progressive.

Their reactions to the American bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites on Sunday offered more evidence of the party’s internal split.

Cuomo, in a statement, criticized “the way Trump went about this without consulting Congress, without consulting the normal congressional officials” but stressed that “Iran cannot have nuclear capability.”

Mamdani released a statement that slammed Trump but quickly shifted focus back to his key issues, saying “these actions are the result of a political establishment that would rather spend trillions of dollars on weapons than lift millions out of poverty, launch endless wars while silencing calls for peace, and fearmonger about outsiders while billionaires hollow out our democracy from within.”

Cuomo, who won three terms as governor, resigned in 2021 after a report from the state attorney general concluded that he sexually harassed 11 women. He has denied wrongdoing.

New York City is using ranked choice voting in its Democratic mayoral primary election Tuesday, a system that allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If one candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, that person wins the race outright. If nobody hits that threshold, the votes are then tabulated in multiple rounds. After each round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Votes cast for that person are then redistributed to the candidates ranked next on the voter’s ballot.

That continues until one candidate gets a majority.

Cuomo’s opponents have urged voters not to rank him at all and therefore deprive him of support in later rounds of counting.

“You do not have to go back to the name of Andrew Cuomo,” said Michael Blake, a former state lawmaker running in the primary. He told voters on WNYC that it was time to move on from the former governor.

Eleven candidates are on the ballot in the Democratic mayoral primary. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams isn’t one of them. He’s a Democrat but is running as an independent. The Republican Party has already picked its nominee, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.