Minnesota’s race for governor sharpened into focus Tuesday night as State House Speaker Lisa Demuth and Sen. Amy Klobuchar won their party primaries, setting up a high-profile general election contest to succeed outgoing Gov. Tim Walz.
On the Republican side, Demuth decisively defeated a competitive field that included MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Army veteran-turned-businessman Kendall Qualls, holding a lead of more than 15 percentage points when the GOP primary was called.
Demuth, who made history as both the first Black lawmaker and the first Republican woman to serve as speaker of the Minnesota House, centered her campaign on cracking down on misuse of public funds. She has promised to move quickly on a sweeping “Fraud Prevention Plan” if voters send her to the governor’s office.
“No longer will our government be fixated on shoveling out taxpayer dollars first and asking questions later,” she said during the campaign. “We will transform Minnesota’s state government into a fiscal and moral steward of our tax dollars.”
Lindell, who received an endorsement from President Trump in July, was headed toward a second-place finish that fell well short of the political breakthrough his supporters had hoped for.
Trump made a late push for the pillow executive on Truth Social just hours before voting ended, writing, “Mike Lindell deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA today.” He praised Lindell as someone who had “worked harder, and given up so much, in fighting for free and fair Elections.”
The president, who has yet to carry Minnesota in a presidential election, urged voters to head to the polls immediately and back Lindell for governor, telling supporters, “He will not let you down.”
But Trump’s backing was not enough to overcome Lindell’s lack of support from much of Minnesota’s Republican establishment, which largely lined up elsewhere in the North Star State’s GOP primary.
The Minnesota Republican Party endorsed Qualls over the pillow mogul in May.
Lindell, who built MyPillow from the ground up into a multi-million dollar company after recovering from an addiction to crack cocaine and later launched his own television network, announced his candidacy last December at his factory in Shakopee.
Ahead of the announcement, Lindell told The Post that he was the most qualified person to “save” Minnesota.
“I watched Minnesota go down, down, down, under horrible leadership, and it’s one of those things, if nobody else can get it done, do it yourself,” he said.
Lindell was one of several Trump allies who boosted claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
In June, Dominion Voting Systems and Lindell settled a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit brought by election technology company over the Republican’s unfounded allegations that Dominion software manipulated vote counts in the 2020 election.
In the Democratic primary, Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who has represented the Land of 10,000 Lakes in the US Senate since 2007, easily overcame six other candidates after a roster of political heavyweights — including state Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, AG Keith Ellison, and Klobuchar’s colleague Tina Smith — opted not to seek the governorship.
The 66-year-old announced her candidacy in late January, weeks after Walz announced he would not seek a third term amid a massive benefit fraud scandal that has made the state a target of the Trump administration.
Klobuchar is a heavy favorite to win the general election in November.
Minnesotans have not elected a Republican governor since Tim Pawlenty secured a second term in 2006.
Whoever succeeds Walz will have to deal with the fallout from the theft of up to $9 billion in taxpayer money via several sprawling social services scams.
The fraud schemes, orchestrated mainly by members of the Somali community in the Twin Cities, involved the setting up of bogus nonprofits that secured state funding ostensibly to provide childcare, food and shelter services to the poor and needy — but was actually spent on cars, luxury goods and even routed to Somalia, ending up in accounts linked to the Al Shabaab terror group.
On the campaign trail, Klobuchar pledged to take a tough approach to tackling fraud.
“Fraud against the state is fraud against Minnesota taxpayers. As Governor, I’ll stop the fraud before it starts, update our technology to track state contracts, and send the criminals who steal your money to jail,” Klobuchar wrote on X Saturday.
The senator has also pledged to begin a “top-to-bottom audit” of state agencies “on day one” to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
However, the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative public policy group based in Minnesota, noted that between Jan. 20, 2022 — the day the FBI raided Feeding Our Future, a bogus nonprofit that bilked taxpayers out of $250 million — and Dec. 31, 2025, Klobuchar issued 1,085 press releases, not one of which mentioned Minnesota’s various fraud scandals.
Before joining the Senate in 2007, Klobuchar served as the lead prosecutor in Hennepin County, which covers Minneapolis and its suburbs. She also made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
She is one of three sitting US senators running for governor of her home state, joining Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) also ran for governor, but lost out to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser in the June primary.
Klobuchar has won all of her statewide elections by at least 15 percentage points.
