Ginger Jentzen

Ginger Jentzen

Ginger Jentzen is a Minneapolis activist.

Council run

Ginger Jentzen isn't the first 2017 Minneapolis city council candidate to come out of recent social justice movements. But after declaring for the open Ward 3 seat in January 2017, she will be the first to run under the banner of Socialist Alternative.

Jentzen was the campaign manager for the $15NOW movement that lost the battle last summer on making Minneapolis the first city in the state with a higher minimum wage.

But the campaign appears to have won the larger war on the issue — bringing pressure that turned a majority of the current council in favor of a city-only minimum wage.

She made her candidate announcement as part of a Socialist Alternative event in Northeast that featured Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant, who won her seat in 2013 as an independent socialist, one of the first in the nation to do so. Sawant is now helping take the movement national.

“After the fight for the $15 minimum wage and with the Trump Administration, it’s incredibly important that we have real fighters for working class people, candidates who come out of social movements that are rooted in the struggles of our communities,” Jentzen said.

“We need people who are as comfortable with building social movements as they are with the everyday tasks of city hall.” she said. Jentzen will not caucus with the DFL this spring.

The Socialist Alternative came into prominence in Seattle in 2013 after electing Sawant as the first independent socialist candidate to win a major city position in decades. Then, with Sawant at the lead, the organization was part of the coalition that succeeded in winning a $15 minimum wage ordinance there.

It is now a national movement, with headquarters in New York and chapters around the nation, including in Minneapolis. It asserts that it fights for the 99 percent and has disdain for the two major parties. “We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires,” says the party’s website.

It is currently organizing resistance to policies of Trump, specifically the threats to deport recent immigrants, to defund sanctuary cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul and the attempt to reopen construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

A Jentzen-led signature gathering project was successful in collecting enough valid signatures to place the $15 wage issue before voters last November. In August, however, the city council voted 11-2 to keep it off the ballot after hearing legal advice that it wasn’t a valid subject for a charter amendment. While a district court judge disagreed and ordered it to appear on the ballot, a city appeal to the Supreme Court successfully defended the council’s original decision to keep it off.

The show of support for the issue, however, led a majority of council members to support the idea and ask city staff to research and draft an ordinance for the council to consider this spring.

Jentzen was also a field organizer for the 2012 council campaign of Ty Moore, who identified as a Socialist Alternative candidate. Moore lost the race in Ward 9 to Alondra Cano by just a few hundred votes. He returned to the city from Seattle in January to be the moderator of what he called a discussion on how to counter Trump and conservatives in the state of Minnesota.

The Ward 3 council seat will become open when incumbent Jacob Frey files for mayor, something he has announced he will do. Already in the race are Samantha Pree-Stinson, Justin Adams, Maleah Otterson, Cordelia Pierson and Steve Fletcher. All but Pree-Stinson are listed on the Minneapolis DFL website as seeking the party endorsement when Ward 3 convenes May 6. The current council’s only Green Party member, Cam Gordon, said Pree-Stinson has told him she will seek the Green Party’s endorsement.

Among declared council candidates, Jentzen is most strongly associated with the wage campaign, but others also come out of social justice backgrounds. In Ward 4, candidate Stephanie Gasca is a labor and Latina activist who pushed the paid safe and sick time ordinance. And in Ward 1, Jillia Pessenda was a leader in the successful legislative campaign of Ilhan Omar. There are also several candidates to emerge from the police accountability movement, especially the protests that sprang from the November 2015 killing of Jamar Clark by a Minneapolis police officer.

Nekima Levy-Pounds, the former president of the Minneapolis NAACP, is running for mayor. Raeisha Williams was communications director of the NAACP and and an organizer of the Black Lives Matter movement. Fellow Ward 5 candidate Jeremiah Ellison (both Ward 5) was a vocal participants in the Black Lives Matter - led activities surrounding Clark’s death.

Supported by DSA

In 2017 Socialist Alternative member Ginger Jentzen stood for Ward 3 of the Minneapolis City Council.

She was endorsed by Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America.

National DSA endorsement

Democratic Socialists of America, August 2017

Our national has an announcement: we are proud to endorse a new list of candidates across the nation.

• Khader El-Yateem, New York City Council
• Tristan Rader, Lakewood, OH, City Council
• Jabari Brisport, New York City Council
• Jon Grant, Seattle City Council
• Ginger Jentzen, Minneapolis City Council
• JT Scott, Somerville, MA Board of Aldermen

DSA conference

Ginger Jentzen attended the Democratic Socialists of America, August 2017 National Convention in Chicago.

First hurdle

Ginger Jentzen, the Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed Socialist Alternative candidate for the city council in Minneapolis’s Third Ward and champion of rent control, a $15 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, and higher taxes on high earners and big property developers. Because of Minneapolis’s ranked-choice voting system, there was no clear winner last night. However, Jentzen did win 34 percent of first-choice votes, six points more than her closest rival, backing up her claim that on Tuesday, “Minneapolis voted socialist.” .