Mike Lindell is a Nutjob

Someone needs to take a nap. Perhaps a cool MyPillow to rest his hot head?

By: Austin Abbring

August 20, 2026

Mike Lindell

A fascinating development is underway in the Minnesota governor primary race. Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and a conspiracy theorist Trump ally, is demanding a recount following his distant second-place finish to Lisa Demuth in the Republican primary for governor. A primary he lost by double digits - 11 points. Yes, you read that correctly. Mr. Lindell lost by over 40,000 votes, is demanding a recount over perceived fraud, and refuses to concede the race. Just to be perfectly clear, there is zero evidence of any voter fraud in this primary race.

The Republican Party’s incessant claims of rigged and fraudulent elections have gotten so bad and run so deep into the psyche of conservative candidates that you have a Republican claiming that the GOP primary is rigged. We have officially come full circle, folks. If you lose elections, no matter what, there is fraud - no matter whether it is a party primary or general election. I only mention all of this because there is a nonzero chance that Mike Lindell, who is so utterly insane, thought he was also competing amongst Democrats in this Republican primary race.

Lindell has until Monday, August 24th, to officially demand a recount, which he would have to pay for because it is outside the margin the state would typically fund. That price tag is a measly $825,000, and he seems fully committed to filing his claim with the Secretary of State. I wish I had nearly a million dollars to completely waste in this manner. Who knows, maybe 40,000 plus “illegals” snuck into polling places and cast their ballots.

Even if Lindell were somehow proven right, his odds of actually winning in the general election are exceptionally slim. Minnesota has not had a Republican governor in a decade and a half, and the state itself has not been red since the Nixon presidential election. Just a few more things to add to the hilariously deranged recount.

Lindell’s policy platform is also rough. It is essentially a carbon copy of a Trump platform: tax cuts for businesses as well as property tax cuts, reforming public school systems in Minnesota (which will be tough to achieve if he cuts property taxes, but I digress), election security overhauls, aggressive immigration enforcement (in the wake of the ICE raids in Minneapolis as well as the two tragic murders of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, I do not think this is a popular position to take in that state at the moment), and my personal favorite - a state-level DOGE action plan. DOGE, which famously found a laughably insignificant level of “government waste”, was, as a whole, a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, destroyed key functions of our government that we are feeling the ramifications from on multiple fronts, was headed by an unelected bureaucrat in Elon Musk, and was an abject failure. So much so that, in the neighboring state of Wisconsin, where Elon Musk backed a conservative Supreme Court candidate, we saw a race won by the liberal justice Susan Crawford by a massive margin. Elon Musk poured $20 million into that race, was on the ground, spreading lies about Social Security, undocumented immigrants, et cetera, and the people of purple Wisconsin spoke. Lindell may want to distance himself from DOGE in the future.

He may also want to distance himself from claims about election fraud. He just recently had to settle in two defamation cases for spreading lies and misinformation about the 2020 election. Given everything I have presented, it would be pretty easy to deduce that Mr. My Pillow is an election denier. Should Lindell follow through and drum up the funds to pay for the full hand recount, and we see the same result, which is going to be the case, this would be yet another brutal loss for a Trump-endorsed candidate. This is the worst year since 2022 for Donald Trump in terms of candidate endorsements, with 11 such races ending in losses. Following this week’s races in Florida and Wyoming, Trump is now at 10 for 2026, with 6 of those coming in August alone. This continues to signal the start of a lame-duck era come November, as Democrats are expected to flip the House with relative ease. The Senate is a long shot, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility. We on the left just need more insane candidates like Lindell to actually win their races so that they get clobbered in the general elections.