Mike Lindell spent years screaming that Donald Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him by voting machines. Now the MyPillow guy has lost his own race by 45,000 votes and has arrived at a completely predictable conclusion: the voting machines did it. The Minnesota Supreme Court disagrees, and so does everyone who has looked at this for more than thirty seconds.
The Court Was Not Impressed
The Minnesota Supreme Court on Saturday rejected Lindell's emergency bid to force a full recount of his August 11 Republican primary loss to state House Speaker Lisa Demuth. Chief Justice Natalie E. Hudson, writing in a six-page ruling, found that the Minnesota secretary of state's office and its State Canvassing Board are, quote, "not committing any wrongful act, omission, or error" as Lindell claimed. Six pages. That's how seriously the court took this.
According to NBC News, Demuth beat Lindell by roughly 45,000 votes in the GOP gubernatorial primary. That is not a squeaker. That is not a nail-biter that warrants suspicious late-night phone calls and fevered spreadsheets. That is a beating. Demuth's win puts her in the general election against Democratic nominee Sen. Amy Klobuchar, which is where Minnesota politics actually live, while Lindell is busy filing paperwork against the concept of losing.
The 'Bait-and-Switch' That Wasn't
Here is the setup Lindell cooked up. He had previously pledged to pay an estimated $825,000 to cover a full hand recount and audit of the race. Then, NBC News reports, he refused to hand over the money by the state's deadline after learning that the recount would only count ballots cast for Lindell or Demuth, rather than every candidate in the seven-person Republican field. He called this a "bait-and-switch" and sued the secretary of state's office and the State Canvassing Board.
The secretary of state's office responded, with the energy of someone who has explained this seventeen times already, that the recount plan followed state law, matched previous recount procedures, and had been provided to Lindell's team after the State Canvassing Board approved it on August 18. In other words, there was no bait. There was no switch. There was a standard recount plan that Lindell decided he didn't like after agreeing to fund it.
Chief Justice Hudson addressed this directly in her ruling, walking through exactly how the recount would work: ballots sorted by party, then Republican ballots split into three piles for Lindell, Demuth, and all other candidates. "In other words, after all votes are sorted and counted, Lindell would know whether he is the winner over Demuth," Hudson wrote. That is the whole point of a recount. That is what a recount is.
The Anomalies, Always the Anomalies
Lindell's actual stated goal is wider than just knowing who won his race. He told NBC News he wants a full hand recount of all ballots cast in both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primaries, because he believes there are "anomalies" caused by electronic voting machines. Hudson had something to say about that too, writing that Lindell's "focus on alleged anomalies confuses the purpose of a manual recount with an election contest."
This is the same theory, deployed against his own primary loss, that Lindell has been selling since 2020. The voting machines are lying. The data is corrupt. Only a hand count of everything, reviewed by Lindell's people, would satisfy him. It's a closed loop. No result that doesn't show what he wants to see will ever be acceptable. At this point it is less a legal argument than a lifestyle choice.
The Tab Is Getting Longer
Lindell told NBC News on Saturday evening that he plans to appeal the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also sending Freedom of Information Act requests to all 87 Minnesota counties to pursue what he's calling an independent investigation of the election data. "I'm willing to pay even more money. I don't care what it costs," Lindell said.
This would be a more impressive statement if Lindell had a strong track record of actually paying what courts tell him to pay. He was found to have defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems employee in June 2025, according to NBC News. In a separate case involving Smartmatic USA Corp., Lindell has refused to pay $56,369 in court-ordered sanctions, and because he keeps not paying, the total owed has grown beyond the original amount due to additional court fees. NBC News reports that Lindell told them this month he still does not intend to pay either the fees or the sanctions. The man has strong opinions about which financial obligations apply to him.
Meanwhile, the Republican Primary Has a Winner
While Lindell pursues his tour of Minnesota's court system and presumably the nation's pillow-adjacent media outlets, Lisa Demuth has a general election to run. She will face Sen. Amy Klobuchar in November, in what shapes up as a genuinely competitive race in a state that has been drifting more purple over recent cycles.
Demuth won a seven-candidate Republican primary by 45,000 votes. She went through the process. She got the recount plan approved. The courts have upheld her win at the highest level available in Minnesota. The fact that her opponent cannot accept this outcome is now, primarily, her opponent's problem. Though it will remain a story for as long as Lindell keeps feeding it, which, based on available evidence, will be a very long time.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a man who built a media empire around the claim that election machines stole the 2020 election just happened to lose his own race by 45,000 votes to the same machines he warned everyone about. And you are supposed to believe that his response to this, which is to refuse to fund the recount he promised to fund, sue the election officials running a standard legal recount, and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, is the behavior of someone who genuinely wants to know the truth. It is not. It is the behavior of someone who has discovered that election denial is more professionally useful than accepting results.
Lindell is not a confused guy who stumbled into this. He is a man who has been found liable for defaming a Dominion employee, who owes Smartmatic sanctions he refuses to pay, who pledged $825,000 to a recount and then pulled out when the recount turned out to be a normal recount instead of a Lindell-supervised audit of everything. The courts have been clear with him repeatedly. He just doesn't care, because the point was never the outcome. The point is the performance.
The Minnesota Supreme Court gave him six pages. Six pages explaining, clearly, why his arguments don't hold up legally. He's going to SCOTUS anyway. He's FOIAing 87 counties. He'll spend whatever it takes, he says, while still refusing to pay the court judgments already against him. This is the guy who wanted to be governor of Minnesota. The voters of his own party said no by 45,000 votes. The courts said no twice. At some point the word "no" has to land. Based on Mike Lindell's history, that point is not anywhere close to now.
Comments