GOP candidates waffle on Biden legitimacy

PLYMOUTH, Minn. – Five Minnesota gubernatorial candidates wiggled, weaseled and wormed at a candidate forum when asked whether President Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The question was asked by conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt. Here, extracted from responses:

Joanne Benson (former state senator, lieutenant governor): At first she deferred on answering directly. “Our job,” she said, is “to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Later she added but still deferring: “The more we watch, the less we cheat.” Pressed further, she replied but still sidestepping: “He was certified by Congress as having won the electoral college.”

Paul Gazelka (former State Senate president): “I don’t think the election was fair, but I do think we have the results that we have, and the Electoral College is the way we determine the election. Each state does their own deal. I’m not a big fan of how that all played out. I focused on Minnesota.”

Scott Jensen (former state senator): “I do know that there were abuses with vouching, harvesting ballots, the absentee ballot system, the mail-in ballots. I do know that there were dead people that voted, and I know that because some of my patients told me where, when a loved one had died, and they got a ballot in the mail.”

Mike Murphy (mayor of Lexington): “I do believe there was voter fraud at a massive scale across this country. Can I pinpoint the evidence down and everything? No, absolutely not. I’m not privy to the scheme and the insight of where it happened. But we did know that it did occur here during the primary in Ilhan Omar’s district, and Project Veritas exposed that, with ballot harvesting.”

Neil Shah (dermatologist): Shah joked that, growing up in the Chicago suburbs, he can’t tell anyone the last time that city had “a free and fair election”. A fair election is not “unique to 2020, ” he said.

Hewitt. California-based syndicated radio talk-show host.