President Donald Trump cannot give up on his delusional 2020 election conspiracy theories. As a result, he has decided to hand Minnesota Democrats easy control of their state in the 2026 midterm elections.
On Wednesday, Trump endorsed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for the GOP nomination for governor in Minnesota. Lindell is an obvious loser waiting to happen, a man with no political pedigree beyond his conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which led to Lindell losing a defamation lawsuit against an employee of Dominion Voting Systems. Of all the possible GOP Minnesota nominees, Lindell is polling the worst because he is a delusional fool with nothing to offer voters.
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The more obvious choice for Minnesota Republicans would be Lisa Demuth, the speaker of the State House of Representatives. Demuth is the only candidate in polling thus far to make the race competitive against Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who is certain to be the Democratic nominee. But Lindell was already narrowly leading GOP primary polling before Trump’s endorsement, and it’s not clear that any amount of objections from the Minnesota GOP is going to make a difference now that Trump has put his finger on the scale.
Minnesota should be fertile grounds for the GOP to make waves later this year, fresh off a massive statewide fraud scandal on the watch of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), which led him to drop his reelection campaign. Republicans should have a perfect opportunity to juxtapose themselves with the state’s fraud-tolerant Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. A Lindell nomination would practically remove fraud as an election issue, as it and everything else would be drowned out by a firehose of stories about Lindell’s conspiracy theories in a state that already leans toward electing Democrats.
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This decision won’t just cost Minnesota Republicans a chance to retake the governor’s office. It will jeopardize House seats held by the GOP and will certainly hamstring state representatives. Both the Minnesota state House and state Senate are practically even, but putting Lindell at the top of the ticket against Klobuchar will give Democrats a boost in state legislative races and allow them to get an even tighter grip on state power.
This is all completely avoidable, but Trump is once again allowing his ego to win out over sane political decision-making. Trump would rather see Republicans lose in Minnesota than stop talking about his 2020 election conspiracy theories, just as he sabotaged the Georgia Senate races in 2021. Those two Georgia Senate seats are still held by Democrats to this day. Trump’s self-sabotage of the GOP will have similar effects years into the future, far beyond when he leaves office.