On election eve, just how long are the odds that Evan McMullin will be our next president? The former CIA agent and independent conservative candidate has ballot access in just 43 states—32 in which his name is actually on the ballot and another 11 that allows his name to be written in. Despite the fact that he doesn’t have ballot access in all 50 states, McMullin actually has a shot—a very, very long one—at winning the presidency.
As my colleague John McCormack explains in a recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, if McMullin were to win Utah’s six electoral votes while neither of the two major party candidates won the 270 electoral votes needed to become president, the House of Representatives then would decide the race under rules applying to deadlocked presidential elections. Thus, the House would choose among the top three electoral vote getters—Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and McMullin—with each state delegation getting one vote. A majority of states would be needed to elect the new president. And so McMullin, a politician for three months now, would have to persuade a majority of states to vote for him.
It is an understatement to say that McMullin follows the polls in Utah, which have taken a turn for the worse for him. He was running neck-and-neck with Trump in mid-October, but McMullin’s momentum has stalled and Trump is now consistently up by 5 to 10 points in the latest polls. That is not an insurmountable lead, given the shape of the presidential race in Utah, a heavily Mormon, conservative values state that votes Republican but has yet to warm to Trump. It helps McMullin’s candidacy in Utah that he is a native of the state and a Mormon who graduated from Brigham Young University. He has conservative credentials—he worked at the CIA and was the chief policy director for the house Republican Conference in the House of Representatives before entering the presidential race. But the statistics website FiveThirtyEight.com now gives McMullin just a 12 percent chance of winning Utah.
McMullin wants “a new conservative movement,” and tells me his candidacy is an effort to “build” it. He cites the Declaration of Independence as “foundational in this effort,” and laments Trump’s “attacks on people on account of their religion and race and ethnicity.” He sees his movement as one built by people of conservative politics who are diverse with regard to their religious beliefs (some even with no faith at all, he says) and race and ethnicity. Utah itself is not as diverse as the movement McMullin envisions.
Given’s Utah’s odd importance on Election Day, the state is especially worth watching as votes are cast and reported. There could be some excitement before the probable result is clear—that McMullin has lost Utah.
