Don Fraser

The Minneapolis City Council’s lone Green Party member, Cam Gordon, is used to anything-might-happen electoral outcomes in Ward Two, which straddles the Mississippi River and includes the University of Minnesota campus. But in this year’s race, one thing’s for sure: He isn’t going to finish within 150 votes of a DFL Party candidate, as he has twice before. For the first time in memory (and probably in DFL Party history) no Democrat is on the ballot for city council in a ward that launched the careers of DFL Party titans like Hubert Humphrey and Don Fraser.

This weekend the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee meets to decide whether to seat the disputed delegations from Michigan and Florida at the national convention. It seems natural enough now, but the idea of the national party making rulings on how states pick delegates was novel 40 years ago. In the wake of the 1968 [...]

Sandy Colvin Roy, chair of the Minneapolis City Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee, was rattling off the next agenda item at the committee’s meeting last week, when a familiar name brought her up short: Donald Fraser wanted to buy a piece of city-owned property alongside his house for one dollar. The excess public right-of-way [...]