MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell may be a rock star on the far right, but New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu isn’t impressed.
Lindell has been one of the most vocal proponents of the unfounded 2020 election-fraud conspiracy promoted by former President Donald Trump. And he is bringing his roadshow to Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday, in the same downtown hotel where the state House of Representatives will be meeting.
New Hampshire’s 400-member House is the third-largest legislative body in the world. Only the United Kingdom’s 650-member House of Commons and America’s 435-member House of Representatives are larger. Convening a body this large during the COVID-19 pandemic has presented logistical challenges, and as a result they’ve met in a parking lot, a hockey arena and, this week, a hotel ballroom.
According to an email sent to the members of the state legislature, Lindell is coming to the Granite State to host “a presentation on the latest tools, techniques, and technology advancements in election security. … It is intended to be a forward-looking discussion on emerging election methods and supporting hardware.”
Sununu’s message to Mike Lindell? Stuff a pillow in it.
“New Hampshire isn’t interested in debunked political conspiracy theories from some infomercial guy. Our citizens can sleep easy knowing that our elections were safe, secure, reliable, and accurate—just as they are every year,” Sununu said.
Lindell has a large national following among Trump supporters, and Sununu’s stance is creating some pushback among his home-state Republicans. At the same time, there are signs that Lindell’s efforts are sputtering and that at least some in the GOP are ready to move on.
“Mike Lindell is entitled to his own opinion. Let’s not forget this is the United States of America and the ‘Live Free or Die’ state,” says Bruce Breton, a Windham, N.H,. selectman and longtime Trump supporter. “We should welcome a presentation on the latest tools, techniques, and technology advancements in election security.”
And last summer, a local right-wing activist group, 603 Alliance, hosted Lindell at an event during which he claimed China had used hacking and algorithms to steal the election from Donald Trump—including in GOP-run New Hampshire.
“Everybody knows it—100 percent this election was stolen,” Lindell told a crowd in Manchester. “It was stolen by machines,” he added. “There had to be some kind of algorithm because it went across all states.” He added that, rather than losing New Hampshire by 8 percentage points (425,000 to 366,000) as the voting machines indicated, Trump actually carried the Granite State, 410,000 to 375,000 votes.
“He crushed New Hampshire. He crushed it,” Lindell claimed.
Lindell, who has earned millions hawking pillows, towels, and slippers on cable TV, has also spent an estimated $25 million hawking his tales of election fraud, many of them disproven.
For example, Lindell issued a self-styled “report” to the Idaho secretary of state that he claimed proved votes for Trump in all 44 counties were electronically switched to Biden. But “at least seven counties in the state don’t use electronics at any point in their vote-counting process,” Utah officials noted.
Lindell has also pushed the theory that 40,000 ballots were flown into Arizona from Asia, leading to a search for bamboo in the ballot paper during the Maricopa County “audit” carried out last spring and summer. (None was found.)
And Lindell recently told an interviewer, “It’s so amazing, all the things that we have. We have all the pieces of the puzzle. You talk about evidence. We have enough evidence to put everyone in prison for life, 300 and some million people, we have that back all the way to November and December.”
Lindell has yet to make public his evidence of wrongdoing by 300 million people. (There are only about 110 million registered Democrats in the U.S.)
What Lindell does have are multiple lawsuits demanding millions in damages for allegedly defaming voting machine companies like Smartmatic and Dominion by making evidence-free claims they participated in a shadowy, international conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, it appears some Republicans are moving past relitigating the 2020 election. Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence denounced Trump’s claims that a sitting vice president could reject the certified electoral votes from the states.
“I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong,” Pence told a conservative group in Florida.
“The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president. Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election.”
Pence received an outpouring of support from Republicans, according to reports.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.
With your membership, you only have the ability to comment on The Morning Dispatch articles. Consider upgrading to join the conversation everywhere.