Lisa Demuth, the speaker of the Minnesota House, won the Republican primary for governor of Minnesota on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. She defeated Mike Lindell, who was endorsed by President Trump.
The contest revealed deep fissures in Minnesota’s Republican Party, which has not won a statewide election since 2006.
State party leaders openly despaired last month when Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Lindell, the MyPillow founder and a prominent election denier who they believed had virtually no chance of defeating the Democratic candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Ms. Demuth, 59, a small-business owner, has represented a largely rural district in central Minnesota since 2019. In 2025, she became speaker of the Minnesota House, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
After narrowly losing the Republican Party’s endorsement, Ms. Demuth stayed in the race, arguing that she was the candidate best suited to take on Ms. Klobuchar. The party’s pick, Kendall Qualls, an Army veteran and businessman, lagged a distant third in polls.
Ms. Demuth has promised to cut taxes and eliminate fraud in social services programs, a growing problem that she said Democrats who have run the state for the past eight years failed to aggressively address.
Ms. Demuth criticized Mr. Lindell, who has never run for office, as ill suited to take on Ms. Klobuchar in November. She called his proposal to provide legal visas to millions of undocumented immigrants baffling, noting that governors had no direct influence over federal immigration policy.
In the Legislature, Ms. Demuth led efforts to cut spending and to establish stronger tools to investigate fraud. Democrats criticized her for blocking gun control proposals and bills that would make it easier for residents to sue federal immigration agents over abusive practices and bar agents from wearing masks on the job.
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