Funny how this works. A guy leads in the polls. A guy has the president’s endorsement. A guy gives up his company, his paycheck, his title, everything, to run for governor of his own state. And the party he’s running in spends the entire campaign trying to knife him in the back.
Mike Lindell lost the Minnesota GOP primary for governor on Tuesday. That’s the headline. But the real story is who made it happen and why.
Ask yourself who benefits when the party establishment’s handpicked candidate beats the guy the actual voters wanted. The Minnesota Republican Party endorsed Kendall Qualls at its May convention, not Lindell. Not the guy leading in the polls. Not the guy with the presidential endorsement. The party bosses looked at their own voters and said, in so many words, “you people don’t know what’s good for you.”
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThen the coordinated attack started. That’s not my phrase. That’s Lindell’s. “It started when I got the president’s endorsement,” he told reporters. And he’s right to call it what it was. The state party chair suddenly had questions about Lindell’s residency. A former party leader dusted off old allegations and ran them in the state’s biggest newspaper. The timing was immaculate. You’d almost think they planned it.
Because they did. The establishment does not tolerate outsiders. It does not tolerate guys who made their money selling pillows on cable TV instead of climbing the party ladder for 30 years. It does not tolerate guys who show up at Farmfest in a dark suit while everyone else is in jeans, talking about how they can pick up the phone and call the president. That kind of independence terrifies the consultants and the strategists and the people who’ve made careers out of telling Republican voters who they’re allowed to vote for.
Republican strategist Preya Samsundar said the quiet part out loud: “It’s more surprising that he did not choose a candidate who had an ability to win statewide.” Translation: Trump should have picked our guy, not the people’s guy. The nerve of that man, endorsing someone the base actually likes.
Lisa Demuth, the other candidate, led the field in fundraising. She’s the speaker of a tied House in a state that hasn’t gone red for president in over 50 years. Her pitch was that she passed bipartisan legislation. In other words, she’s a creature of the system who knows how the system works because she is the system. That’s what the party wanted. A team player. A rubber stamp with a nicer resume.
Chad Davis (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd Amy Klobuchar, already circling for the general election, stood on the same stage and called the Republican candidates rubber stamps for Trump. She didn’t even bother distinguishing between them. Why would she? The party did her work for her.
Here’s what sticks in my craw. Lindell stepped down as CEO of MyPillow to do this. He walked away from his own company. He put everything on the line. And the party he was running to represent spent the final weeks of the campaign amplifying residency complaints and resurfaced allegations instead of rallying behind the frontrunner. They’d rather lose with Qualls than win with Lindell, because a Lindell win would have proven that the voters, not the party apparatus, decide who gets to be the nominee.
Trump never won Minnesota. Not once in three tries. But his endorsement was enough to make Lindell the frontrunner, and that was enough to make the establishment panic. They couldn’t beat him on ideas. They couldn’t beat him on polls. So they beat him with the machine.
The little guy got played again. Same as it ever was.