On Monday's Morning Joe on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough announced that Evan McMullin, a former Goldman Sachs employee and CIA operative, is running as an independent conservative presidential candidate against Donald Trump. The news was then confirmed by McMullin’s campaign website and social media. What do we know about the man willing to take on Trump’s inflammatory journey to the White House?
Not much; McMullin’s website is bare, with only an invitation to join his mailing list and links to his measly social media accounts. As of this writing, his Instagram has no posts yet, his Twitter has ten thousand followers, and his Facebook has no posts and only a couple hundred likes. McMullin did not respond to Complex’s request for comment. He does have a LinkedIn profile, though.
McMullin was born in Utah and attended Brigham Young University, a Mormon school and America’s largest religious university, according to his Facebook page. Both McMullin and Trump attended The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and have never run for public office, but the similarities end there. According to the Guardian, McMullin’s candidacy is being pushed by #NeverTrump supporters in the Republican Party.
Opposing @realDonaldTrump is about putting principle over power, a virtue some in Washington are too quick to abandon. #NeverTrump
After graduate school, McMullin “served as a Mormon missionary in Brazil and volunteer refugee resettlement officer in Amman, Jordan, on behalf of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees,” according to his Facebook page. He continued on to train as a CIA operative, claiming that he was at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Sept. 11, 2001 and subsequently “repeatedly volunteered for overseas service in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, spearheading counterterrorism and intelligence operations in some of the most dangerous places on earth.”
Once he completed his CIA service in 2011, McMullin worked at Goldman Sachs until 2013, when he joined the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs as a senior adviser and later became the chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. McMullin hasn't published an official platform yet and not much is known about his proposed policies, but he has spoken out against about Trump in the past, especially his controversial proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
When McMullin declared his candidacy on Monday, he said:
In a year where Americans have lost faith in the candidates of both major parties, it’s time for a generation of new leadership to step up. It’s never too late to do the right thing, and America deserves much better than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton can offer us. I humbly offer myself as a leader who can give millions of disaffected Americans a better choice for President.
While entering the presidential race this late might seem ill-advised, McMullin’s character and circumstance might be the exact combination needed to challenge Trump’s divisive campaign. Trump has a notoriously bad track record with Mormon voters, a contingency that might help McMullin make a dent in the polls.
On Mormons' dislike of Trump, Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins, who is Mormon, wrote:
Trump is off-putting to Mormons for more predictable reasons as well. His blatant religious illiteracy, his penchant for onstage cursing, his habit of flinging crude insults at women, his less-than-virtuous personal life and widely chronicled marital failures—all of this is anathema to the wholesome, family-first lifestyle that Mormonism promotes. And demographically speaking, Mormons tend to reside outside Trump’s base of support anyway. They have higher-than-average education levels, whereas Trump does best among voters without any college education; they are more likely to be weekly churchgoers, while Trump performs better with Christians who attend services infrequently.
During this year's primaries, Trump suffered his biggest loss in Utah, America's most Mormon state. Ted Cruz received 69 percent of the vote, while John Kasich received 17 percent, and Trump only 14 percent. In Idaho, the second-most Mormon state, Trump lost by 18 points. In Wyoming, the third-most Mormon state, Trump only mustered 70 votes, losing to Ted Cruz by 59 points.
If Mormon voters and the growing #NeverTrump party back McMullin, he might have more of a chance against Trump than you’d think.
