'I'm not allowed to come': Mike Lindell claims GOP banned him from governor's debate

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says the Minnesota Republican Party has shut him out of a major gubernatorial debate — and he's not staying quiet about it.

"They have a big GOP endorsement where they have this big debate, and I'm not allowed to come," Lindell told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast. "They've shut me out because the establishment doesn't want me, Steve."

The exclusion is the latest twist in Lindell's chaotic bid for the Minnesota governorship, where he claims to be leading the Republican field despite being frozen out by his own party.

"We've raised the most money," Lindell insisted. "We're number one in the polls with the Republicans, and we can't have the same input to get the same output."

It's a remarkable situation: a candidate with Trump's public backing being sidelined by the very party his patron leads. Lindell took direct aim at frontrunner Lisa Demuth, the sitting Minnesota House Speaker, suggesting her tenure made her complicit in the state's massive welfare fraud scandal.

"All this fraud happened under your watch, too," he said. "Just because you have an R in front of your name, you should have screamed a lot louder."

Lindell's campaign is already operating in turbulent waters. He's running while simultaneously fighting the wreckage of years of election denialism, having been found liable for defaming both a Dominion Voting Systems employee and election tech company Smartmatic over his debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

A February Emerson poll showed him trailing Democratic frontrunner Amy Klobuchar by 22 points — 53% to 31%. When Newsweek asked for comment, Lindell's response was two words: "Fake news!"

None of that, Lindell says, is slowing him down. He told Bannon he's organizing teams across all 67 Minnesota Senate districts, blanketing the state with 26,000 yard signs, and drawing on his old MyPillow hustle to power the effort.

"Just like I went town to town with pillows out of the back of a pickup truck," he said. "We are going to bring hope to Minnesota and hope to the country."

One GOP strategist wasn't buying it. "I think for him, it's more about the headlines," Amy Frederiksen, a former Minnesota Senate majority leader, told CBS News. "I really do. I don't know anyone saying, 'You know who we need? Mike Lindell.'"

Republicans haven't won a statewide race in Minnesota since 2006. With Lindell locked out of the debate and the party establishment lining up behind Demuth, that streak looks unlikely to end with the pillow king at the top of the ticket.