Kaohly Her became the first woman and first Hmong American to be elected St. Paul mayor in the 2025 election.
Her’s win early Wednesday morning came as a surprise, as she was “cautiously optimistic” minutes prior to the announcement.
“I think people just feeling like they were heard. That somebody showed up at their door and somebody talked to them, and that they were able to express that even if they might have been OK with status quo, that they wanted better for our city,” Her said before her victory.
The race went to the second-choice votes after the first round votes were tallied shortly before midnight. At the time, incumbent Mayor Melvin Carter had 40.83% of the vote and Her had 38.43%.
Carter said that challenges throughout his past two terms made the race close.
“We’ve been through, over the past several years, some of the greatest crises and challenges that our city has ever been through,” Carter said. “Some of them based on events that have happened across the globe, and some of them, frankly, based on historic roots in our city, and so we fully expected it to be close.”
While some people last Friday dressed in Halloween costumes or handed out candy to trick-or-treaters, a group of U.S. data scientists published a list of datasets that have been axed, altered or had topics scrubbed since Trump returned to the White House.
The timing of the release of the “Dearly Departed Datasets” with “All Hallows’ Eve” may have been cheeky, but the purpose was serious: to put a spotlight on attacks by the Trump administration on federal datasets that don’t align with its priorities, including data dealing with gender identity; diversity, equity and inclusion; and climate change.
Officials at the Federation of American Scientists and other data scientists who compiled the list divided the datasets into those that had been killed off, had variables deleted, had tools removed making public access more difficult and had found a second life outside the federal government.
The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments Wednesday over President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, putting a tool at the center of his economic and foreign policy agendas squarely before the high court.
The case involves the tariffs first announced in April on almost all U.S. trading partners and the ones from February on imports from Canada, China and Mexico. Trump justified these by declaring separate national emergencies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Earlier this year, however, two lower courts and a federal appeals court ruled that the emergency law he invoked doesn’t give him unlimited power to set tariffs. The Constitution says tariff power belongs to Congress.
Now, arguments on whether the president’s tariffs overstep federal law arrive before a conservative-led Supreme Court, which has thus far been reluctant to check to Trump’s wide-ranging use of executive powers.
Leila Montoya can be reached at mont1761@stthomas.edu.
