Trump has endorsed Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, to be the next governor of Minnesota, throwing his weight behind one of his most loyal allies weeks before the state’s Republican primary. Trump announced the endorsement on Truth Social on Wednesday morning, July 15, instantly reshaping a race that had been considered wide open.
In his post, Trump praised Mike Lindell as one of the country’s hardest working patriots and framed the endorsement around election integrity, a cause the two men have pushed together for years. He gave Lindell what he called his “complete and total endorsement” and predicted he would not let voters down, while taking a shot at Minnesota’s current Democratic governor, Tim Walz, whom Trump described as one of the worst in the country. The backing was not a shock, since Lindell has been among Trump’s most visible supporters since 2020.
For anyone outside political circles, Mike Lindell is best known as the MyPillow Guy, the founder who turned himself into a household name through relentless late night television ads. Over the past several years, though, he became something else entirely, one of the most prominent public promoters of the false and widely debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. That crusade is what made Lindell a national figure on the right and a lightning rod everywhere else.
It has also come at a steep cost. Lindell’s election claims have drawn a series of defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies, and the results have not gone his way. He recently settled a long running case with the company formerly known as Dominion, he lost a separate defamation suit brought by a former Dominion employee and is appealing that decision, and the voting technology firm Smartmatic won a summary judgment against him. In other words, the same theories that earned him Trump’s loyalty have tied him up in court for years, and he has stayed defiant through all of it.
None of that has slowed his political rise in Minnesota. Mike Lindell is running in a three way Republican primary set for August 11, with early voting already underway, and Trump’s endorsement immediately upends the dynamic. His main rivals are Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls, a retired health care executive who actually won the state Republican Party’s official endorsement back in May. A SurveyUSA and KSTP poll from earlier this month showed Mike Lindell leading the primary field with 27 percent, ahead of Demuth at 22 percent and Qualls at 17 percent, so Trump’s backing lands on a candidate who already had momentum.
Here is the catch, and it is a big one. While Lindell may be the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination, polling suggests he could be the weakest option for the party in November. A June survey found Lindell trailing badly in a hypothetical general election matchup against the Democratic nominee, Senator Amy Klobuchar, while Demuth ran much closer. That gap has reportedly alarmed some Minnesota Republican operatives, who worry that nominating Lindell would hand the governor’s office to Democrats in a race they might otherwise contest. Trump’s endorsement, then, is a clear boost in the primary and a real gamble for the general.
Lindell, for his part, was thrilled. In an interview after the news broke, he said his mind was racing with excitement and that he had no idea the endorsement was coming that day, calling it a jolt of hope for his campaign. He has centered his platform on the same election themes that made him famous, telling Minnesota outlets that he wants to get rid of voting machines entirely in favor of hand counts and paper ballots. He has gone as far as saying the machines should be melted down and turned into prison bars.
The timing of the endorsement is hard to miss. It arrived one day before Trump is expected to deliver a primetime national address focused on voting machines and election security, the exact issue that has bonded him and Lindell for the better part of six years. Backing Lindell on the eve of that speech puts an exclamation point on the message.
Whether it all works is the open question. Trump’s primary endorsements have a strong track record of pushing his chosen candidates over the top, and Lindell believes this one carries him past Demuth and Qualls to the nomination. What happens after that is far less certain. Minnesota has not elected a Republican governor in nearly two decades, and the same profile that makes Mike Lindell a MAGA favorite is what makes establishment Republicans nervous about putting him at the top of the ticket. For now, the MyPillow founder has the one endorsement that matters most in a GOP primary, and the race just got a lot more interesting.
