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Opinion | Evan McMullin tries to thread a needle in Utah [1]

['Perry Bacon Jr.']

Date: 2022-02-18

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Utah U.S. Senate candidate Evan McMullin isn’t a Democrat. But he’s very much a democrat — a strong believer in voting rights, the rule of law, respect for election results, a free and strong press, and other ideals that didn’t seem under threat until the emergence of Donald Trump. This is a promising approach for running in a red state.

If you follow politics closely, you’ve likely watched McMullin’s rise. The 45-year-old native Utahn served in the CIA for about a decade before entering national politics. By 2015, he was one of the top policy advisers to House Republicans. That gave him an up-close view of the GOP establishment’s quick and deplorable shift from largely opposing Donald Trump to embracing him.

Instead of falling in line, McMullin left his job on Capitol Hill. In August 2016, after trying to get a more prominent anti-Trump Republican to run, McMullin entered the presidential race himself, both to give conservatives an alternative and to demonstrate that not all of the party was aligned with Trump.

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McMullin expected Hillary Clinton to win, setting up a fight over the future of the GOP between those who embraced Trump and those who didn’t. Instead, McMullin’s mission turned into opposing President Trump and the Republican Party under his leadership. He became an independent and founded a political organization called Stand Up Republic that worked to defeat far-right candidates in GOP primaries and to elect moderate Democrats like President Biden. McMullin, who specialized in national security policy as a congressional staffer, now focuses particularly on democracy issues such as gerrymandering, with an overriding goal of fighting the more radical parts of the Republican Party.

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Now, the extremism of the GOP — even after Trump’s presidency — has inspired McMullin’s new campaign against incumbent Sen. Mike Lee. And he’s in this one to win.

Lee, like McMullin, opposed Trump in 2016, but then he shifted to a pro-Trump stance. While Utah’s other senator, Mitt Romney, voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in both 2020 and 2021, Lee campaigned for Trump’s reelection and at a rally even likened him to Captain Moroni, a revered commander in the Book of Mormon.

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“Mike Lee is a reliable vote for the far-right, insurrectionists, and Mitch McConnell,” McMullin told me during a recent interview. “I will not be.”

McMullin thinks Lee’s posture has created an opening for a particular kind of Senate candidate in Utah — someone in the political center on policy; critical of the radical GOP elements but not the whole party; and capable of winning the votes of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. McMullin, for instance, was supportive of the pro-democracy bill that Democrats were pushing this past month and takes more Democratic stands on issues such as the environment. Critically, he says he would not vote for McConnell (R-Ky.) to be majority leader, arguing that the Kentuckian is a “destructive force” in American politics.

But McMullin opposes vaccine mandates, as well as proposals championed by left-wing Democrats such as Medicare-for-all and adding seats to the Supreme Court. “I don’t check all the boxes for the Democrats,” he said.

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You can see the strategy: Electorally, McMullin is trying to appeal to several different camps without firmly aligning with any. To get rank-and-file Democrats behind him, he touts his support from prominent Utah Democrats, most notably former Salt Lake City-area congressman Ben McAdams. He’s urging the Utah Democratic Party not to formally nominate a candidate in the race, a request that the party is seriously considering.

At the same time, to sway independents and moderate Republicans, McMullin isn’t seeking the support of national Democrats such as Biden and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), nor the Democratic Party’s endorsement. Romney, who is popular with independents and moderate Republicans in Utah, isn’t likely to break with the GOP and back McMullin. But in a boon for the challenger, Romney may not endorse Lee either. “He considers both friends, so I don’t expect him to make an endorsement in this race,” a source close to Romney told me. It’s unusual for a senator not to endorse a home-state colleague from the same party. If Romney stays on the sidelines, it will be harder for Lee to consolidate the votes of moderate Republicans.

“In order to win, we have to work together. This has to be a coalition,” McMullin said. “The coalition that I’m building cannot be successful without Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans. If the Democrats nominate a major candidate, then we will not be able to build this coalition.”

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Could it work? Maybe. I worry that the overwhelming majority of voters in Utah, like those around the country, are fairly partisan and that McMullin will be judged primarily by his record of anti-Trump comments, no matter what else he says. Utah is Republican enough that Lee can win if he convinces enough Utahns that voting for McMullin is akin to a voting for a Democrat.

But McMullin disagrees with my analysis, at least for idiosyncratic Utah. He argues that plenty of voters there are either centrists or else hold a mishmash of positions that don’t fully fit with either party. And he argues that people in Utah aren’t all that pro-Republican, even if they are fairly anti-Democratic.

And he might be right. Trump beat Biden in Utah 58-38 in 2020. But in 2016, Trump won only 45 percent of the vote, compared with 27 percent for Clinton, 21 percent for McMullin and nearly 4 percent for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. For comparison, in 2018 Romney won 63-31 over his Democratic opponent. These numbers suggest that a Utah candidate who positions himself as Romney-like, and his opponent as Trumpy, could win.

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I still think Lee is the favorite. But I’m glad McMullin is running with this nonpartisan approach. Any challenge to an incumbent such as Lee, who would back McConnell for majority leader, is welcome. And I think it’s useful for those wary of the radicalism of the GOP to try out many electoral approaches, whether that’s running from the left, the center or the right, and whether that’s running with the Democratic Party or separate from it.

We need more Democrats in the Senate. But more important, we need more democrats in the Senate — like Evan McMullin.

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/18/evan-mcmullin-tries-thread-needle-utah/

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