Minnesota Republicans endorsed Kendall Qualls for governor in May.
Donald Trump endorsed Mike Lindell in July, Lindell jumped to a double-digit lead, and the state party has spent the weeks since asking election officials whether its likely nominee even lives in Minnesota.
Voters settle it Tuesday. The Republican primary for governor is a three-way race among Lindell, the MyPillow founder and 2020 election denier; Lisa Demuth, the speaker of the Minnesota House; and Qualls, the retired health care executive the party actually endorsed. Recent polling put Lindell at 35 percent, Demuth at 26, and Qualls at 11. The party’s chosen candidate is running third in his own party’s primary, which tells you roughly everything about what a state endorsement is worth in 2026.
The Residency Question Is a Lever, Not a Concern
Minnesota requires a governor to have lived in the state for a year before the election. Lindell was living in Texas as recently as 2025, and in early August the Republican Party of Minnesota asked state officials to clarify the standard before anyone voted. Party chair Alex Pleckasch pressed the point publicly. KSTP quoted a state Republican describing the situation as an extraordinary one, which is a polite way to say that a party does not normally litigate the eligibility of the man about to win its nomination.
Read the timing rather than the legal theory. Nobody raised residency in March. It surfaced after Trump’s endorsement moved the numbers, when the establishment lane ran out of persuasion and reached for procedure instead. There is a separate complaint alleging Lindell violated campaign finance rules by handing out promotional pillows at a Fourth of July parade, which is either a real disclosure issue or the single most Minnesota campaign scandal ever filed.
Lindell resigned as chief executive of MyPillow on Aug. 5 to focus on the race, and NOTUS reported that he was stepping back from the company as it worked through its own financial and legal strain. Walking away from the business that made him famous is not the behavior of a candidate who expects to be disqualified on a technicality.
Why the Party Thinks It Is Right Anyway
The electability argument Minnesota Republicans are making privately is not crazy, and it has a name: Amy Klobuchar.
Tim Walz announced in January that he would not seek a third term, and Klobuchar entered the race to replace him. She took the Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsement in May and, as MPR News laid out in its rundown of the DFL field, is expected to clear a primary ballot crowded with candidates who have no statewide profile. So the seat is open, Minnesota has not elected a Republican governor since 2006, and the party is staring at a general election against a three-term senator with universal name recognition.
Against that, the establishment case is straightforward. Nominate the businessman nobody has an opinion about, keep the race focused on Walz’s record and the social services fraud scandal that shadowed his final term, and hope Minnesota’s habit of splitting tickets does the rest. Nominate Lindell and the race becomes a referendum on Lindell.
The problem with that case is that primary voters have heard it before and stopped finding it persuasive. Political analyst Abou Amara put the dynamic plainly to CBS Minnesota: “I think it’s rage against the machine, and I think Mike Lindell is going to be able to say this is exactly what Donald Trump had been doing.” When the pitch is “vote for the man we picked because the man you like will lose,” the base hears an institution telling it that its preference is a liability.
The Pattern Is National and the Establishment Keeps Losing It
None of this is unique to Minnesota. In May, Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary despite a sitting senator’s institutional advantages and a long list of Republicans warning he would put a safe seat at risk. The warning may even have been accurate. It was also irrelevant, because a party endorsement is a signal to donors and activists, and a Trump endorsement is a signal to voters.
Minnesota’s open primary sharpens that further. Any registered voter can pull a Republican ballot Tuesday without declaring a party, which means the people the state committee endorsed Qualls in front of are not necessarily the people voting.
There is a second race on the ballot worth watching for the mirror image. The DFL Senate primary pits Rep. Angie Craig against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, moderate against progressive, and it is the same fight about who owns a party fought by people who agree on most policy. Democrats have their own version of this argument, as Michigan showed last week when Abdul El-Sayed won a Senate primary against heavy outside spending.
What Tuesday Night Actually Decides
If Lindell wins, Minnesota Republicans have to spend the fall defending a nominee whose residency they themselves questioned in August, and every attack Klobuchar’s campaign runs will be able to cite the state party as its source. That is an unusual gift to hand an opponent.
If Demuth or Qualls wins, the more interesting question is whether a Trump endorsement can fail in a low-turnout August primary in a state he has never carried, and whether anyone in the party will say so out loud.
Either way the polls close Tuesday night, and the residency question does not go away with the result. It just moves from a party press release into a general election that runs until Nov. 3.