Best of the Best (Duluth News Tribune): How Voting Works & How to Win

Minnesota runs three of these ballots, and they don't share a calendar

Minneapolis has one. Brainerd has one. Duluth has its own. Minnesota's Best, the Star Tribune's statewide program, the Brainerd Dispatch's regional Lakes Area ballot, and the Duluth News Tribune's Best of the Best all ask the same basic question, who's the best business around here, and all three answer it on completely different schedules.

A business that assumes "Minnesota readers-choice season" is one thing, happening once, will miss two of the three windows. Duluth's calendar in particular sits earlier in the year than Brainerd's and wraps up faster.

Three papers, three ballots, one state. A business that qualifies for more than one, say a Duluth restaurant that also draws visitors chasing the statewide Star Tribune list, needs three separate reminder schedules, not one. See the Minnesota's Best guide for the statewide version and the Brainerd Dispatch's Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area for the other regional one.

Two eighteen-day windows, one nine-day gap between them

June 22 to July 10. Then nothing until July 20. Then July 20 to August 7. That's the confirmed shape of the 2026 Best of the Best calendar, and the symmetry is the interesting part: both the nomination round and the public voting round run exactly eighteen days.

Why the matching lengths matter for planning

A campaign that treats the nomination window and the voting window as different in scale, spend more effort getting nominated, coast through the vote, is working against the actual data here. Both stages get the same amount of calendar time from the paper, so both deserve roughly the same outreach effort from a business trying to win.

The five-week wait after voting closes is the longest quiet stretch in the whole cycle. Nothing published here explains what happens during it, so treat late August as normal silence, not a stalled contest.

What Best of the Best 2025 actually confirms, and what it doesn't

Winners. That's the confirmed fact from the 2025 cycle: the Duluth News Tribune named them, and the program followed through on its own results date. A published vote cap, a fixed category list, and a count of how many businesses typically enter are three things that never surfaced while researching this program.

That gap is worth naming plainly rather than filling with a guess. A business searching for "how many votes does it take to win Best of the Best" won't find that number here, because the Duluth News Tribune hasn't published it. What can be said honestly: the paper ran a real 2025 cycle with real confirmed winners, and it's running the same structure again for 2026 on a published calendar.

For the general mechanics behind an award-style readers-choice push, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies to any of Minnesota's three ballots, and a restaurant or bar weighing a Food & Beverage-type category can check the restaurant vote campaign guide for pacing reminders around a fixed window like this one.

The Twin Ports trade area is bigger than the city of Duluth

Duluth anchors the ballot, but the paper's actual readership runs wider than city limits. Hermantown sits just west along the highway, Proctor and Rice Lake sit close behind it, and Two Harbors, Esko, and Cloquet each pull in their own commuting and shopping traffic that overlaps with downtown Duluth on a normal week.

West Duluth in particular functions almost like its own commercial strip inside the larger city, distinct enough that a business there markets differently than one on the Lakewalk downtown. None of that changes the ballot's mechanics, one shared duluthnewstribune.com/dntbest page, but it does change who a campaign should actually be reaching. A Cloquet hardware store and a downtown Duluth coffee shop are both plausibly eligible, and neither should assume the other's customer base overlaps with its own.

A regional paper covering that many small commercial centers also means word travels. An inflated claim about a nomination gets noticed by someone who actually shops in Proctor or Esko regularly, faster than it would in a metro the size of the Twin Cities.

Running a campaign without overstating what's confirmed

Two windows, eighteen days each, five weeks apart from the results date. That's the entire confirmed skeleton to plan around. A realistic campaign sends a reminder near the start of nominations, one mid-window, one near the July 10 close, then repeats roughly that same rhythm across the July 20-August 7 voting stretch.

What a legitimate push cannot do is guarantee a September 11 outcome, or claim a specific vote count nobody has published. Is buying votes legal covers the boundaries worth understanding before committing budget to any contest push, and how online contest votes work lays out the general mechanics behind a reminder campaign like the one this calendar calls for. Businesses also entered in Minnesota's other readers-choice ballots, the Hobey Baker Award Fan Vote and the Minnesota High School Athlete of the Week poll among them, run on entirely separate mechanics from a business ballot like this one, so don't borrow strategy across them without checking the actual rules first.