Did George Soros give money to Jacob Frey’s “run for Mayor of Minneapolis??
Executive summary
There is no reporting in the provided sources that George Soros personally or his Open Society Foundations directly donated to Jacob Frey’s mayoral campaign; instead, progressive groups tied to Soros-funded entities made a large donation to a separate political committee backing a charter amendment that Frey opposed (Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis) [1]. Public campaign and local reporting show Frey ran for and held the mayor’s office, but the evidence supplied links Soros-backed money to ballot advocacy — not to Frey’s campaign coffers [2] [1].
1. The core claim and what the documents actually show
A widely cited $500,000 contribution tied to George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center appears in reporting about Minneapolis politics as a single large gift to a newly registered committee called Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis, which was formed to campaign for a charter amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department; Minnesota Reformer identifies the donor as the Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center and documents the $500,000 contribution to that ballot initiative effort [1]. That contribution was to an independent ballot committee, not to Jacob Frey’s mayoral campaign, and the story frames the money as supporting groups like Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block around the charter question — a matter Frey publicly opposed [1].
2. What exists on Frey’s side: campaign context and fundraising totals
Jacob Frey ran for mayor in 2017 and was reelected in 2021 (and mentioned as running again in 2025 by his campaign site), with routine campaign finance activity and endorsements documented in local profiles and public records; Ballotpedia and Frey’s official materials detail his candidacies and municipal record, but do not show Soros as a listed donor to his candidate committee in the provided records [2] [3]. Minnesota Reformer expressly points out the $500,000 gift to Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis was “more than double the $234,000 Mayor Jacob Frey has on hand for his reelection campaign,” underlining that the Soros-linked money was targeted at the amendment fight, not the mayoral campaign bank account [1].
3. Confusion, narratives, and why the distinction matters
Political narratives often collapse separate streams of influence — independent expenditures, ballot-initiative committees, PACs and candidate committees — into a single “did Soros fund X” shorthand, which obscures that Soros-affiliated funds in this episode were spent on an independent ballot-advocacy group rather than directly contributing to Frey’s campaign [1]. That difference is legally and politically meaningful: independent ballot committees can spend on issues or candidates’ broader landscape without coordinating with or donating to a candidate’s campaign; the Minnesota Reformer reporting supports that distinction by naming the Open Society Policy Center as the donor to Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis [1].
4. Alternative claims, fringe reporting, and limits of the record
Some outlets and partisan commentary attempt to tie Frey to various donors or controversies — for example, a fringe site claims deep entanglements between Frey and unrelated scandals — but those claims in the supplied corpus are not corroborated by mainstream local reporting or the official city and campaign materials provided here, and should be treated cautiously [4]. Public records and the sources supplied do not show George Soros personally writing a check to Jacob Frey’s mayoral campaign; available reporting instead documents Soros-backed independent spending on a ballot amendment that put Frey on the defensive [1] [2]. The record here is limited to the supplied sources; broader campaign-finance databases like OpenSecrets could be queried for granular donor-to-candidate mappings but were not cited with a Frey-Soros link in the materials given [5].