Evan McMullin
David Evan McMullin is an American politician and former Central Intelligence Agency officer. McMullin ran as an independent in the 2016 United States presidential election and in the 2022 United States Senate election in Utah.
McMullin was a CIA operations officer from 2001 to 2010. In 2011, he received an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an investment banker for about a year and a half. He was a senior adviser on national security issues for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2015 and served as a chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2015 through July 2016. McMullin left the Republican Party in 2016 after Donald Trump became the party's presumptive presidential nominee.
McMullin ran for president in the 2016 election as an independent backed by the organization Better for America. He received support from some members of the "Never Trump" movement, and polling taken late in the campaign showed him ahead of major party nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in his home state of Utah. McMullin received 21.5% of the vote in Utah, taking third place in the state behind Trump and Clinton. Nationally, he received 0.5% of the popular vote.
Following his defeat, McMullin emerged as a vocal critic of the Trump administration. He endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. He has been involved in early discussions about forming a new center-right political party, and organized the May 2021 release of the political manifesto "A Call for American Renewal" with Miles Taylor. In 2022, McMullin launched a campaign as an independent in the U.S. Senate election in Utah, receiving the endorsement of the Utah Democratic Party. He was defeated in the November 8 general election by incumbent Republican Mike Lee, losing by a margin of ten percent in the closest Senate election in Utah since 1976.
Early life and education
McMullin was born on April 2, 1976 in Provo, Utah, the oldest of four children of David McMullin and Lanie Bullard. At a young age, his family moved to a rural area outside Seattle, Washington, where his father worked as a computer scientist and his mother sold bulk foods to neighbors from the family's garage. After graduating in 1994 from Auburn Senior High School, McMullin spent two years in Brazil as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Upon returning, he spent a summer working on an Alaskan fishing vessel.In 1997, McMullin began attending Brigham Young University ; every year he was in college he did a summer internship with the CIA. He spent a year living in Israel and Jordan and volunteered as a refugee resettlement officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2001, McMullin graduated with a bachelor's degree in international law and diplomacy and began formal training with the CIA to become an operations officer. After working for the CIA, McMullin attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he received an MBA in 2011.
Career
CIA intelligence officer
Soon after McMullin joined the CIA, the September 11 attacks occurred, leading to an accelerated training and deployment. He spent the next decade working overseas on counterterrorism and intelligence operations as an operations officer with the National Clandestine Service, operating in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. He was first deployed in 2003 and left the agency in 2010. His deployments included postings in an unspecified southwest Asian country that was key to the-ongoing war on terror.While the details of his missions remain classified, former CIA officers who worked with McMullin praised his work, noting his talent for recruiting members of extremist organizations through building trust and willingness to engage in human intelligence outside the confines of the embassy. His former supervisor said that U.S. intelligence goals at that time included information-gathering for efforts against the Taliban, developing intelligence for counter-terrorism strikes, and searching for information leading to Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Near the end of his CIA career, he worked undercover in Iraq. McMullin said his work involved meeting with business and government leaders, as well as collecting information from terrorist operatives.
Career in business and as House staffer
After leaving the CIA, McMullin attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his MBA in 2011. McMullin then worked for the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs for about a year and a half. In 2012, he volunteered for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, which indirectly led to him being recruited by Republicans on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs looking for an adviser with counter-terrorism experience. In 2013, McMullin was an International Advisory Board member for the Kennedy Center for International Studies at BYU.In 2013, McMullin became a senior adviser on national security issues for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs for the 113th Congress. In 2015, McMullin became the chief policy director of the House Republican Conference under Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers. It was from this position that he watched the 2016 Republican primaries, and when he began to speak out against Trump he was urged by some Republicans to stay out of the fray. McMullin resigned as chief policy director shortly before declaring his run for the presidency in August 2016.
Political activity
2016 presidential campaign
On August 8, 2016, McMullin announced that he would run as a candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election as an independent. He had personally lobbied several Congresspeople to run under the Better for America banner, but when none would run and it was suggested to him that he should run himself, he decided to do so. McMullin ran as an independent conservative alternative to Trump, and had the support of several anti-Trump Republican donors, and his presidential bid was also backed by several former members of Better for America, a 501 organization dedicated to getting nationwide ballot access for an independent candidate for president in the 2016 election. McMullin's campaign was supported by some members of the "Never Trump" movement.In September 2016, McMullin said Trump "poses a true threat to our national security by carrying Putin's water in the United States" and criticized Russian government activities to promote Trump and his allies, saying that these activities undermined the U.S. and global economies and were destructive to peace and security. He criticized Russian disinformation campaigns that targeted Western Europe and North America "through fomenting discord between different racial groups, different ethnic groups, and different religious groups." He criticized Republican congresspeople who publicly supported Trump while privately expressing alarm at Trump's actions and statements, saying that many Republican officials were "afraid to speak out against" Trump for fear of losing their seats, and said: "Anyone who supports Donald Trump is someone who I think is not too committed to the constitution. I believe Donald Trump poses a true threat to our constitution and those who support him are sustaining that threat." In a December 2016 rally, Trump attacked McMullin, referring to him as "McMuffin" and saying, "I never even heard of this guy before. Nobody did."
McMullin's late entrance into the race caused him to miss several state ballot deadlines, and ultimately he was only able to appear on the ballot in eleven states, with write-in eligibility in many other states. As such he did not appear on enough ballots to win the necessary Electoral College majority of 270 electoral votes, so instead McMullin hoped to deny a majority of the electoral vote to either of the two major-party candidates. In such a scenario, under the terms of the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives would select the new president from among the top-three electoral vote winners.
The same day that McMullin launched his independent bid, Kahlil Byrd and Chris Ashby, Republican strategists with expertise in third-party ballot access, announced the formation of a super PAC called Stand Up America to support McMullin's campaign via TV and digital ads, events, and organizing. On October 6, McMullin named Mindy Finn as his running mate. Finn had previously worked for Twitter and as a digital strategist for the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Because Finn's selection came after the ballot paperwork deadlines, Finn did not appear on any of the state ballots. Instead, McMullin's friend's name, Nathan Johnson, was submitted as a placeholder.
McMullin's support surged in Utah in October after the release of a 2005 audio recording in which Donald Trump was heard bragging in lewd terms about making sexual advances on women. McMullin's popularity in Utah – and Trump's unpopularity – appears owing to an unusual shift of Mormons away from the Republican candidate. Prognosticators gave McMullin a 3–10% chance of winning the state. Had McMullin won Utah, it would have been the first time since 1968 that a non-major-party candidate won a state.
Ultimately, McMullin's best performance came in Utah, his native state, where he came in third place, receiving 21.5% of the state's popular vote, behind both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He also took third in Idaho with 6.7%. Nationwide, McMullin received 734,737 votes, in the states he was on the ballot. After the election, McMullin said that "the fight would continue" for a "new conservative movement" reaching out to "non-traditional conservative voters... who feel disaffected". It might, he said, form a new political party. While running for president in 2016, McMullin's campaign amassed about $664,000 in debt to campaign vendors, mostly from legal fees. It is common for unsuccessful presidential campaigns to incur such debts, and McMullin said in 2022 that he was committed to paying down the debts. Utah businessman and former Republican Kimball Parker Dean wrote that McMullin's 2022 Senate campaign raised the possibility that he could use the funds he raises to pay those debts.