Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman, Trump supporter and election denier, has refused to concede defeat in Minnesota's Republican gubernatorial primary, despite trailing by a double-digit margin the morning after polls closed.
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The Associated Press called the race for Lisa Demuth, the Minnesota House speaker, late on Tuesday night.
With almost all votes counted, Demuth was more than 45,000 votes ahead of Lindell, who had the backing of Donald Trump, beating him by 43.4% to 32.5%.
Businessman Kendall Qualls, backed by the Republican state party, was trailing in third.
Told by a reporter on his own streaming channel, LindellTV, that the AP had declared the race over, Lindell dismissed the wire service outright. Asked why he wouldn't accept the call, he questioned the AP's authority to determine the outcome and insisted hundreds of thousands of votes remained uncounted.
"I'm not going to give up this race until the votes are counted," Lindell said. "That's nonsense."
Lindell did not return a request for comment on what steps he will take next to contest the election, as he waits for the votes to come in.
Lindell built his political career on the claim that Trump's 2020 defeat was the product of a rigged and stolen election, spending what he has said were tens of millions of dollars pursuing that conspiracy theory through lawsuits, documentaries and conferences, even as courts repeatedly threw it out. Last month he settled a $1.3bn defamation suit brought by voting technology company Liberty Vote, formerly known as Dominion Voting Systems, regarding the stolen election lies.
Lindell's campaign was also dogged by questions over his own eligibility to run. He was, for weeks, not registered to vote in the state whose governorship he was seeking – his registration remained active in Texas, tied to a property owned by a company in Lufkin, even as he told reporters he had re-established Minnesota residency. Minnesota's same-day registration rules meant he could still cast a ballot, and run, regardless.
Trump, who has failed to carry Minnesota in three consecutive presidential elections, made a late, personal push for Lindell on Tuesday, urging Minnesota Republicans on social media to hand him a decisive win and praising his commitment to "free and fair" elections.
Lindell's defeat extended a run of losses for Trump-endorsed candidates, including House races for Andy Ogles, a representative in Tennessee, and Amir Hassan, a navy veteran in Michigan who lost to a candidate who had dropped out.
Demuth, who becomes the first woman to win a Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nomination, called the result a milestone but said her campaign's work was "not done yet".
She will face Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator who easily won her own primary, in November's general election to succeed the retiring governor, Tim Walz.