Minneapolis Mayoral Race 2025: Rev. Dr. Dewayne Davis enters the fray

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

New candidate quietly planning a mayoral run against Frey?

The next mayoral election in Minneapolis isn’t until 2025, but self-proclaimed political nerd Josh Martin (Southwest Voices, Minneapolis Documenters) has shared news of Jacob Frey’s first “major opponent” via Bluesky:

Rev. Dr. In addition to serving as lead minister at Plymouth Congregational Church in downtown Minneapolis, Dewayne Davis was elected chaplain of the Minnesota Senate in 2023; the first black, gay person to do so. That fall, he told his alma mater Howard University that fighting oppression — especially white oppression — is central to his work. “It created in our religion and politics a demonization and oppression of black bodies, and by extension the female body and the queer body,” he told the school’s alumni magazine. “And so I have to say something because I exist in that body.”

A few more fun facts about Davis: He grew up in Mississippi, is the youngest of fifteen siblings and currently lives on the North Side with his husband Kareem Murphy, director of government relations for Hennepin County.

Will Mississippi market workers vote to unionize tomorrow?

If they do, they’ll join co-ops like the Wedge and Seward, plus grocers like Kowalski’s, Lunds & Byerlys and Cub. But it hasn’t been an easy road to get to this point, and signs point to resistance in the future. On September 19, Mississippi Market employees announced their intention to join UFCW Local 1189. “Recently there has been a lot of restructuring at the store and this has put many employees in a position that I never want to see happen again,” member owner Rowan Garrigan told Cirien Saadeh at Minnesota Women’s Press last month.

But MM has chosen not to recognize the unions’ efforts, so tomorrow workers will vote on whether to join a union. “We are confident that our employees will review the matter and make a decision that is right for them and their families,” CEO Catherine Downey said in a statement. And what Downey apparently thinks is ‘right’ is that there is no union. As workers began looking into unionization in 2018, Workday Magazine described a leaked letter to employees as “evidence of an anti-union perspective.” And this time, Mississippi Market has hired a lawyer, hiring Littler Mendelson PC, a law firm that helped crush the union drives at both Starbucks and Apple.

McDonald’s partners with Cargill

According to someone on Twitter, there’s a McDonald’s in Connecticut that charges $17.59 for a Big Mac combo meal, and that really pissed people off. But the rising costs of fast food are not due to the chain’s insatiable greed, they argue. It’s actually the fault of the beef mafia, run by JBS, Tyson Foods, Swift Beef Co., National Beef Packing Co., among others. and Cargill of Wayzata. In a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court, McD’s accuses the four major beef suppliers and their subsidies of conspiring to control supply and demand, thereby setting beef prices “artificially higher than beef prices would have been without their conspiracy. ”

While it’s hard to support a company involved in this, it’s not the first time the meat industry has been accused of price gouging. AP points out that in 2022, for example, JBS “agreed to a $52.5 million settlement in a similar beef price fixing lawsuit” and that Tyson spent $221.5 million in 2021 to quell inflated chicken price allegations press.

Meanwhile, the fast food chain’s prices continue to skyrocket. NBC found that the average price of all menu items at McDonald’s “has increased 40% over the past five years… That’s higher than overall consumer prices, which have increased 21% since December 2019.” A Lending Tree survey in May found that 80% of Americans now consider fast food a luxury.

Just in time for National Pork Month: Locally made alcoholic bacon cider

Aren’t we over the bacon obsession of the 2010s yet? Apparently not, because we’ve been seeing weird pork and booze-related drinks popping up around town. Earlier this fall, Em went to Insight Brewing to try the super-limited-edition Glizzy McGuire, a hot dog-flavored hard seltzer that they found wasn’t “that aggressive” once you got “past the smell.” And now, North Loop cidery Number 12 is teaming up with Farmland for a bacon-and-apples collaboration that launched yesterday at the taproom. You can get it there ‘while supplies last’. We only need one more pork and alcohol concoction before this becomes a trend again.