Demuth to face Klobuchar after first woman GOP nomination
MyPillow founder Mike Lindell refused to concede Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary the morning after polls closed, despite the Associated Press calling the race for state House Speaker Lisa Demuth late Tuesday night. With almost all votes counted, Demuth was more than 45,000 votes ahead of Lindell, beating him 43.4% to 32.5%. Businessman Kendall Qualls, backed by the state Republican Party, was trailing in third.
Told by a reporter on his own streaming channel, LindellTV, that the AP had declared the race over, Lindell dismissed the wire service outright. Asked why he would not accept the call, he questioned the AP’s authority to determine the outcome and insisted hundreds of thousands of votes remained uncounted.
“I’m not going to give up this race until the votes are counted,” Lindell said. “That’s nonsense.”
Lindell did not return a request for comment on what steps he will take next to contest the election as he waits for the votes to come in.
Demuth, who becomes the first woman to win a Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nomination, called the result a milestone but said her campaign’s work was “not done yet.” She will face Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator who easily won her own primary, in November’s general election to succeed the retiring governor, Tim Walz.
Lindell built his political career on the claim that Trump’s 2020 defeat was the product of a rigged and stolen election, spending what he has said were tens of millions of dollars pursuing that claim through lawsuits, documentaries and conferences even as courts repeatedly threw it out. Last month he settled a $1.3bn defamation suit brought by voting technology company Liberty Vote, formerly known as Dominion Voting Systems, over his stolen-election claims.
His campaign was also dogged by questions over his own eligibility. He was, for weeks, not registered to vote in the state whose governorship he was seeking — his registration remained active in Texas, tied to a property owned by a company in Lufkin, even as he told reporters he had re-established Minnesota residency. Minnesota’s same-day registration rules meant he could still cast a ballot, and run, regardless.
Trump, who has failed to carry Minnesota in three consecutive presidential elections, made a late personal push for Lindell on Tuesday, urging Minnesota Republicans on social media to hand him a decisive win and praising his commitment to “free and fair” elections. Lindell’s defeat extended a run of losses for Trump-endorsed candidates, including House races for Andy Ogles, a representative in Tennessee, and Amir Hassan, a navy veteran in Michigan who lost to a candidate who had dropped out.
MSI previously reported that Trump endorsed Lindell in July and that Lindell leaned on his ties to the president in the lead-up to the primary, a race he now refuses to concede.