After years of denying other elections, MyPillow founder won’t accept his own defeat
The day after a primary race is often when opponents within a party come together to express unity as the winner moves on to the general election. But MyPillow founder Mike Lindell isn’t going that route.
Lindell refused to concede after news outlets called Tuesday’s Republican primary for Wisconsin governor, state House Speaker Lisa Demuth. He claimed, without evidence, that there were issues with the vote counting — even though he trailed Demuth by nearly 11 percentage points.
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Lindell has a history of making false allegations about election fraud, which has landed him in legal trouble. But this is the first time Lindell has publicly questioned a primary election, and the first time he has denied election results for a race in which he was a candidate.
What are Lindell’s claims?
Even before outlets called the election for Demuth, Lindell told reporters who asked if he could make up Demuth’s growing percentage of the votes that he wouldn’t concede, The Independent reported.
“Why would I listen to the AP?” Lindell asked. “There’s 265,000 votes left to count. I’m down by 18,000 now. I’m not going to give up this race until the votes are counted. That’s nonsense.”
Lindell did not elaborate on his allegations of election irregularities but said he has teams looking into it.
“We’ve got different teams, right now,” Lindell said. “I’ve been on the phone with three of them and the one person said, ‘Yes, we’ve seen a couple of anomalies.’”
Lindell said polling just before the primary showed him in the lead. But polls have been particularly unreliable during this year’s primaries.
How did the race play out?
Late last year, Lindell launched his campaign to replace retiring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. President Donald Trump endorsed Lindell in July, saying in a Truth Social post that he would be “SPECTACULAR,” and referred to him as the “Pillow Man.”
Trump issued another Truth Social post on Tuesday, saying Lindell “deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA.” As of midday Wednesday, unofficial results showed Demuth leading Lindell by more than 45,000 votes out of 413,000 cast in the Republican primary, according to the Minnesota secretary of state’s office.
Despite his endorsement by Trump, Lindell did not have the support of the Minnesota Republican Party. In July, the party released a statement warning that Lindell had little chance of defeating Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who easily won the state’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party primary.
“We were surprised by President Trump’s endorsement of Mike Lindell,” the party wrote last month. “We strongly support the President and his agenda, but Minnesota Republicans must choose the candidate best positioned to defeat Amy Klobuchar.”
The party also took issue with Lindell’s move to Texas, saying “When the going got tough under Tim Walz, Mike Lindell left Minnesota for Texas.” Lindell told The Independent that he spent about a year in Texas before returning to Minnesota for the primaries.
Previous election denial claims
This wasn’t Lindell’s first time alleging election issues. He was a prominent voice in pushing Trump’s false narrative that widespread voter fraud prevented him from being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. To date, no evidence has emerged proving Trump’s allegations.
Lindell’s claims have led to multiple lawsuits, including those filed by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, two voting machine manufacturers. Dominion sued Lindell and MyPillow in February 2021, alleging he pushed false claims that Dominion’s voting machines manipulated vote counts to help the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, win. A federal judge allowed the case to proceed, and the Supreme Court later rejected Lindell’s attempt to dismiss it.
The case dragged on in court for several years before a company bought out Dominion, later renamed it Liberty Vote and moved to dismiss the suit in June, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported. The company said both parties had “agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter.” Lindell, however, said he wouldn’t stop criticizing the voting machine company despite the dismissal.
“I’m still going after them. I don’t care if it’s sold to Liberty Vote or whatever,” he said, The Star Tribune reported. “All [voting] machines have to go and I’m not stopping, and they know that.”
A week after Dominion filed its suit, Smartmatic filed its lawsuit over the same claims. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled in September that Lindell did defame Smartmatic, finding him liable on summary judgment. The case is still working its way through the courts, with a separate trial expected to determine damages.
After the ruling, Lindell told The Associated Press that he hadn’t seen it but said it was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.” He said he would keep fighting until Smartmatic’s machines are “melted down and turned into prison bars.”