Endorsing the MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in Minnesota's Republican primary for governor, Trump offered a theory of why his party keeps losing the state. 'If the Elections in Minnesota weren't RIGGED, any Republican could win,' he wrote on Tuesday, 'but they were, and that is why nobody has won there since Richard Nixon many years ago' [1]. The post fuses one true fact to one false cause, which is why it belongs in its own category - a conspiracy claim offered as fact, to be labeled and set beside the record rather than scored true or false.
The true part is narrow and specific: no Republican has carried Minnesota in a presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1972 - the longest such streak of any state [1][2]. That is a real record, and it reflects how Minnesotans have voted for president, not evidence that anyone rigged it.
The 'RIGGED' claim has nothing behind it. Minnesota votes on paper ballots and runs post-election audits, and election officials have found no evidence of significant fraud [2]. The idea that 'any Republican could win' if not for rigging runs into an inconvenient fact: Republicans do win statewide in Minnesota. Tim Pawlenty was elected governor in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, serving until 2011; Norm Coleman won a US Senate seat; Arne Carlson served two terms as governor in the 1990s [3]. A state that elects Republican governors and senators is not one where 'any Republican could win' only in the absence of fraud.
The move is a familiar one: take a real pattern - a long run of Democratic presidential wins - and swap the ordinary explanation, that more Minnesotans preferred the Democrat, for a criminal one, that the vote was stolen [1][2]. The first is politics. The second is a charge, made here with no evidence and against a record of Republicans winning the very statewide races the claim says they cannot [2][3]. Minnesota has not backed a Republican for president in half a century. It has, in that same span, sent Republicans to the governor's office and the Senate [3].
