Mike Lindell’s Latest Election Deception: Sowing Doubts About Kentucky Governor’s Race

Logo used in fundraising emails by right-wing activist Mike Lindell.

Pillow salesman turned Trump-supporting election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell is now making baseless insinuations that the recent reelection victory of popular Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was somehow rigged. In an email sent Tuesday to supporters of his “Lindell Offense Fund,” Lindell wrongly claimed that “it makes no sense” that Beshear defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron. In another email sent Wednesday, Lindell falsely claimed, “Kentucky Governor election has an unbelievable outcome. So much so that all hands are on deck to fight the suspicious outcome.”

The truth is that Beshear led in pre-election polls, even though the race tightened at the end. His victory made plenty of sense to anyone paying attention to state politics. As documented by many journalists who wrote about the election, Beshear benefited from his family’s long presence in state politics, competent stewardship of economic development, and effective responses to natural disasters.

And, while the religious-right-aligned Lindell would not be likely to admit that Cameron’s anti-abortion extremism hurt him, Beshear took it on directly. While Cameron supported the no-exceptions-for-rape-or-incest abortion ban passed in 2022 by the state’s Republican-supermajority legislature over Beshear’s veto, Beshear’s campaign ran a devastating ad featuring a young woman who had been raped at age 12 by her stepfather. “This is to you, Daniel Cameron,” the woman says in the ad. “To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable.”

Lindell has been raising money and promoting bogus election conspiracies for the past three years. He has made and refused to deliver on promises that he had acquired evidence to prove that the Chinese government hijacked the election by hacking voting machines. He promoted the widely debunked claims made by Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” movie and book. Religious-right figure Lance Wallnau has promoted Lindell’s latest scheme—which Lindell says was given to him by God—to use drones that would supposedly expose fraud by detecting WiFi signals. Earlier this month, Lindell declared that giving him money to supposedly secure the 2024 election would be “the best bang for your buck to save your country of any time in history since 1776.”

Lindell’s recent conspiracy-mongering email about the Kentucky focused on numbers, implying that the only explanation for Cameron receiving fewer votes than he did in his election as attorney general, and for Cameron getting 150,000 fewer votes than the Republican secretary of state did in this election, was some kind of systemic fraud:

What gives? And why is the MSM ignoring this massive discrepancy?

This is one of the reasons why LOF is here – and why I continue to call out the LIES OF THE LEFT – the Rigged Machines, the Manipulation of Data, and the Early Voting and Absentee Voting – both easily rigged!

The email’s ridiculous claims are, of course, a prelude to Lindell asking for money to continue his efforts to “SAVE THIS GREAT COUNTRY” by doing away with voting machines, early voting, and mail-in ballots.

Trump’s lies about election fraud fueled the rage of his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The kind of lies Trump and Lindell have relentlessly promoted since then have stoked anger and harassment against election officials, many of whom have left their jobs. As the Brennan Center’s Larry Norden told ABC News this month, Lindell’s relentless promotion of false claims about election fraud are dangerous: “Mike Lindell has gotten away with lying a lot about elections, but it’s not without consequences and not without harms to individuals who work in elections — and more broadly to the functioning of our democratic system.”

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