Best of Twin Cities: How Voting Works & How to Win

How Best of Twin Cities stacks up against Minnesota's other readers-choice ballots

bestof.mspmag.com is not Minnesota's only readers-choice ballot, and treating it like the default one is a mistake. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine runs Best of Twin Cities as a metro-only program, ranking Gold, Silver, and Bronze in each category rather than naming one winner. That's a different shape from Minnesota's Best, a statewide ballot, and from the Brainerd Dispatch's Best of the Best, which covers the Brainerd Lakes region two hours north and answers to a newspaper, not a magazine.

Three programs, three different footprints. A Woodbury dentist chasing recognition has to pick the right ballot, or possibly two, since none of them share a nomination pool.

The full ballot, current categories, and this cycle's open dates live at the Minnesota contest hub, which tracks every active program in the state side by side.

What Gold, Silver, and Bronze actually change about the campaign

A single-winner ballot has one finish line. Best of Twin Cities has three per category, and that changes what a realistic goal looks like. A restaurant chasing Gold in Food & Beverage isn't automatically shut out if Silver is the honest ceiling this cycle; a Bronze placement still prints in the May issue with the business's name attached.

Why three tiers beat one for a metro this size

The Twin Cities metro runs deep with competitors in most categories, so a single winner-take-all format would bury a lot of legitimate local businesses under one name per year. Three medal tiers spread recognition across more of the region's actual commercial base, closer to how award-style vote campaigns tend to perform best anyway: steady, real turnout across a season, not one spike.

That's a different mechanic from Minnesota's fan-vote sports polls, like the Hobey Baker Award Fan Vote or the Minnesota High School Athlete of the Week ballot, where one name wins each cycle and nothing else places. Best of Twin Cities rewards consistency across three tiers instead.

The 2026 record: 118,000+ votes and a confirmed Gold for Luther

Some years leave almost nothing to cite. 2026 isn't one of them. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's Best of Twin Cities logged more than 118,000 votes cast that cycle, and Luther was confirmed as the Gold winner for Best Auto Dealership. That's one of the few named, dated results on the publicly available record, worth sitting with for a second.

Luther is a large, multi-location Minnesota auto group, not a single small shop. A win of that scale in a public vote suggests the Auto Dealership category draws real turnout, not a token handful of ballots. What isn't confirmed here is a full winners list across every other 2026 category, a category count, or a per-category vote breakdown; those should be read straight off bestof.mspmag.com rather than assumed from the Luther data point alone.

A business weighing whether Best of Twin Cities turnout is worth chasing can treat 118,000+ as the honest baseline scale for the whole ballot, spread across however many categories the magazine runs that year, not as a number any single business should expect to see next to its own name.

Nominate in November, vote in January, read results in May

Six months, three separate moments. Write-in nominations open every November, voting itself runs in January at bestof.mspmag.com, and the results don't surface until the magazine's May issue. A business that only starts paying attention once voting opens in January has already missed the step that gets it on the ballot in the first place.

That lag matters for anyone running a real turnout push. A supporter reminded to vote in January has to already know the business was nominated back in November, or the ask lands cold. And a business waiting on May to see whether the campaign worked needs three or four months of patience the calendar doesn't shortcut.

The exact day the nomination window opens, and the exact day voting closes, isn't part of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's public record; confirm both dates on bestof.mspmag.com directly each year rather than reusing a prior cycle's calendar. For the mechanics behind running any vote push across a defined window like this one, how online contest votes work covers the general pattern.

Running a campaign across Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the ring suburbs

Best of Twin Cities doesn't group its ballot by neighborhood. A downtown Minneapolis coffee shop and a Woodbury coffee shop compete in the same Food & Beverage slot, not separate metro-side heats, so a nomination has to hold up against the whole region's field, not just the immediate block.

Edina, Bloomington, Maple Grove, Eden Prairie, and Minnetonka round out the suburban ring that feeds this ballot alongside Minneapolis and St. Paul proper. A business anywhere in that footprint is eligible to compete on equal footing; geography inside the metro isn't a factor in how the medal tiers get assigned.

What is a factor: real customers actually clicking through to bestof.mspmag.com and voting, repeated across the January window rather than crammed into one day. Award-style vote campaigns and general contest vote support both cover the mechanics of sustaining that kind of push, but no service can promise a specific medal tier in a program this size. The boundary for any of it sits in is buying votes legal, worth reading before a push attaches to any one named business.