City Council incumbents Don Samuels (Ward 5) and Barb Johnson (Ward 4)

City Council incumbents Don Samuels (Ward 5) and Barb Johnson (Ward 4)

So much for election night drama in Minneapolis. Despite more than 50 candidates vying for 13 posts on the Minneapolis City Council, only two contests resulted in the top vote-getter failing to surpass the 50 percent threshold required for victory under the new instant-runoff voting (IRV) system. Incumbents Barb Johnson and Don Samuels each easily out-polled their challengers but failed to earn first-choice support from more than half of voters on Tuesday.

This means that election officials will now have to go through the laborious process of hand-counting voters’ second and third choices to determine who will ultimately be declared the winner. But results posted at the Secretary of State’s Office suggest Samuels and Johnson are likely to prevail when all the electoral dust settles.

Let’s consider the math. Johnson, the city council president and four-term incumbent, was the top choice of 47 percent of voters in Ward Four. Among her trio of challengers, Troy Parker finished a distant second with support from 28 percent of voters. Johnson also received 23 percent of second-place votes and 21 percent of third-place votes. The upshot: She appears a lock for re-election.

Four years ago, Johnson faced no electoral opposition. But this year she narrowly survived a battle with Parker for the DFL endorsement and was hit by last-minute revelations about dubious campaign expenditures. Even so, she appears headed for a fifth term.

Samuels’ position appears only slightly more tenuous. The Ward Five incumbent was also the top choice of 47 percent of voters. Running second was a familiar foe: former city council member Natalie Johnson Lee, with first-choice support from 30 percent of voters. Three other challengers trailed well behind.

But Johnson Lee, who lost to Samuels four years ago, doubled up the incumbent on second-place votes, 34 to 16 percent. She also narrowly topped him for third-place ballots with support from 22 percent of voters. While this means the race will undoubtedly tighten as the other candidates are dropped and second- and third-choice votes are added, it seems likely that Samuels will ultimately reach the 50-percent threshold.

The incumbent says he has not heard from any of his challengers. But he’s not surprised by the lack of congratulatory calls considering the novel voting calculations and the lingering uncertainty about the outcome.

“The promise of ranked-choice voting is that the very unlikely is likely to happen,” Samuels says. “There’s a thread of hope out there no matter how thin.”

But for all the electoral activity and hand-wringing over the potential implications of the new voting system, the end result is this: every incumbent who ran for re-election appears likely to prevail.