“We need to start voting for leaders whom we actually want to see in office,” Evan McMullin says as we sit together in a small conference room. “Or we will never get them.”
McMullin is running the longest of long-shot campaigns. He announced an independent bid for the presidency just seven weeks ago. He’s on the ballot in only 11 states, though he’s got ballot access as a write-in candidate in 16 others and expects to be ballot-eligible in 40 states by Election Day. He is unlikely to have the financial resources to run even a single TV ad.
What McMullin has going for him is this: He’s smart. He has expertise in counterterrorism. His foreign-policy worldview is much closer to the mainstream than anyone else running this cycle. He is genuinely conservative. And he is—this cannot be emphasized enough—a normal human being.
Usually it’s the crazies who run as third-party candidates. Look back through the recent history of third-party presidential runs and you see a crusading consumer-rights advocate (Ralph Nader), a disgruntled-but-militant former Republican congressman (Bob Barr), a pothead former governor (Gary Johnson), and a conspiracy-addled Texas businessman (Ross Perot). Not a normal banana in the bunch—and those are guys who got more than 500,000 votes.
McMullin is nothing like those sideshow candidates. If anything, he bears a distant resemblance to the only other reasonable man to run as a third-party candidate in the modern era—John Anderson. And Anderson got almost 6 million votes.
McMullin is a good distance off of that pace. But he’s starting to register in some polls—at 1 percent nationally, but 3 percent in Virginia and 9 percent in Utah. The campaign’s not-unreasonable view, explains chief strategist Joel Searby, is that as the Trump-Clinton race tightens, “that elevates our status in this race significantly. And we have a real chance to make a significant difference.”
If McMullin pulled 3 percent nationally, he’d earn as many votes as Anderson did in 1980. And it’s not hard to see his appeal: McMullin went to Brigham Young University, got an MBA at Wharton, and then joined the CIA. He spent 11 years in the clandestine service fighting the war on terror before mustering out and going to work for Goldman Sachs in Silicon Valley—after which he decamped to Washington, where he became the chief policy adviser for the House Republican caucus.
So he’s an interesting combination—both a former spook with an understanding of field operations and a wonk’s wonk who engages with policy at a high level. He’s also conservative in the traditional sense—which was almost universally accepted in the Republican party until five months ago. All of this makes him unique in the 2016 field: Neither Clinton nor Trump has any firsthand understanding of either military or intelligence work. And both are politically liberal.
Consider, for example, how McMullin discusses foreign policy. In a speech at Georgetown University last week, McMullin said that America is the “most powerful nation on earth,” but:
What’s striking when you hear McMullin talk about “liberty”—he mentions it often, along with “freedom”—is the realization that it is a word Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump almost never utter. And for good reason: It is a value that neither the Democratic nor the Republican nominee holds in particularly high esteem. The former is devoted to “equality” while the latter worships “strength.”
All of that said, McMullin is not a starry-eyed dreamer. His campaign is bullish on its growth potential, but realistic about the election. For instance, those Virginia and Utah polls showing McMullin at 3 percent and 9 percent, respectively, were taken after he had been in the race for only three weeks. Searby believes they’ll soon be registering “in the places where we’re active—like Ohio and Iowa and Minnesota and Colorado. We’re on the ballot in all of those states,” he says. “And so if you start thinking about how thin the margins could be in this race and the fact that we’re already polling from 1 percent to 9 percent in a given state, that’s a difference-making percentage.”
At most, the McMullin campaign believes he could win a state or two and throw a tight election to the House. “But we’re not banking our entire existence on that,” Searby says. “We also believe, deeply, that it’s time for a new generation of American leadership. And so we are building this movement. And that is an equally important goal to us.”
Which leads to the key question of 2016: Has Donald Trump poisoned the GOP beyond saving, forcing conservatives to form a new party? McMullin minces no words about Trump.
“Not enough” has been made of Vladimir Putin’s role in the 2016 election, McMullin says. “Putin is clearly trying to destabilize our democracy. He’s doing that through his support of Donald Trump.”
“The challenge is that most Americans don’t have the experience of having served in intelligence as I have, so they can’t necessarily see this developing as directly as I do.” He points to the Putin-controlled cable network RT America, which has shown a Hannity-like devotion to Trump. And Trump has returned the favor, appearing in an exclusive interview on the network.
Then there’s WikiLeaks, which now appears to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Russian intelligence. There are the Russian pro-Trump Twitter mobs. There was Paul Manafort with his Russian connections; the reports of Trump’s financial entanglements with Russian investors; and the uncomfortable support of General Mike Flynn. “Flynn is a terrible disappointment as a retired intelligence officer,” McMullin notes acidly. “He’s on the payroll of RT America and has become a sympathizer for Vladimir Putin. One has to wonder about that.”
McMullin points out that Trump has flipped on nearly every issue imaginable—from immigration to taxes to abortion; from the Iraq war to his party registration. “The one thing Trump will not compromise on is his support for Putin,” McMullin says. “And it makes you wonder why he would be so committed to a man who is actively trying to undermine democracies in Europe and the United States.”
“As a former CIA officer,” he says carefully, “I firmly believe that Donald Trump poses a threat to our democracy.”
McMullin’s campaign actually appears to be about something bigger than the 2016 presidential race. If Trumpism is the future of the Republican party, I asked him, do we need a new party?
His answer surprised me in its certitude. “I believe we do,” he said evenly.
“We’re organizing and building for a movement,” Searby, the campaign strategist, explains. “We already have state chairs in 35 states and they’re helping organize. In places like Wisconsin, we already have 35 county chairmen lined up. In places like Ohio, we already have county chairmen lined up. And Iowa. And Utah. So the kind of things that a traditional party would do, we’ve already been doing those things. And so we’re laying groundwork to have an army of people who want to be a part of whatever comes next.”
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
