On August 8, a new candidate entered the race for the presidency of the United States. His name is Evan McMullin, and he’s an ex-CIA agent and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker. McMullin has also served as a policy director for the House Republican Conference of the U.S. House of Representatives.
But McMullin’s campaign is being steered by at least one man who was a longtime Democratic Party operative — Kahlil Byrd — a senior strategist and former communications director for former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, the same man who Barack Obama “borrowed” lines of speeches from when he ran for president in 2008.
Were those speeches actually written by Byrd? It’s hard to know, but to this day, the president and the former governor remain close friends.
Who is Evan McMullin, and why is he entering the race now?
Born in Provo, Utah, McMullin is a mere 40 years old, a Mormon who served as a missionary in Brazil before graduating from Brigham Young University and getting an MBA from the Wharton School of Business (Donald Trump’s alma mater).
McMullin spent 10 years working for the Central Intelligence Agency in its National Clandestine Service, operating as an undercover agent for intelligence, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in the Middle East (where he claimed to speak “beginner’s Arabic”), North Africa and South Asia.
In 2011, he went to work for investment bank Goldman Sachs in the company’s San Francisco mergers and acquisitions office. In 2013, McMullin acted as a senior advisor for national security issues on the House Committee for Foreign Affairs during the 113th Congress. In 2015, he was made the chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, giving up the post earlier this year.
McMullin has delivered speeches to groups such as TEDx and alumni at the University of Pennsylvania on topics as diverse as Syrian genocide and poverty in America, the latter of which he’s criticized the U.S. government for, saying that despite an enormous amount of money spent fighting the condition, poverty rates in the nation are roughly the same as they were in the mid-1960s.
McMullin claims he wants to position himself as an alternative to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He stands particularly opposed to Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim refugee resettlement policies. On social media, he wrote, “Donald Trump continues attacking Muslims, and as a former CIA officer, I’d like all Americans to know the truth… attacking them as a group makes America weaker, not stronger.”
As a theoretical conservative, McMullin looks set to threaten the campaign of Trump more than Clinton. McMullin has called Trump an “authoritarian” while claiming the candidate is “weak” and will ensure that Clinton wins the presidency.
In an interview with Tom Llamas on ABC, McMullin stated, “I question whether [Trump] actually has the stamina to complete the race. He is ensuring that Hillary Clinton wins this election. I think they would both be absolutely terrible… Donald Trump does not care about anyone but himself. I do believe he is a fraud and a con man and that’s not something I say lightly.”
In the same interview, McMullin disclosed that individuals he couldn’t name were responsible for financing his campaign. Given the participation of Byrd, however, one has to wonder who those people are and what McMullin is even doing in the race.
Kahlil Byrd has long experience working with Democrats and was highly sought after on a national level even before he worked for former Governor Patrick. In 1994, Byrd started working as a U.S. Assistant Attorney General under President Bill Clinton. His advisor David Axelrod left to go work for Obama in 2006, after Byrd’s Obama-like political slogan “Believe Again” helped put Patrick in the Massachusetts Governor’s office.
In 2012, Byrd set up an organization called Americans Elect, which tried and failed (despite raising more than $40 million) to field a third-party candidate to run against Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Byrd was both an International Affairs Fellow and Team Member at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a graduate of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Earlier this year, in conjunction with Chris Ashby, another political operative, Byrd formed a Super PAC called Stand Up America to support McMullin’s candidacy with grassroots organizing and digital advertising.
Stand Up America will not be responsible for ballot access for McMullin, leaving that duty to another group, called Better For America (BFA), which has been identified with the #NeverTrump movement.
BFA is being partially funded by former Mitt Romney fundraiser John Kingston. Kingston has been involved with efforts by William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine, to field a third-party candidate.
BFA has been working to put placeholder spots on ballots in a number of states and is supported by donors tied to Mitt Romney, former president George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain.
A spokesman for BFA denied that it was working on behalf of McMullin at this point, but several of McMullin’s campaign staff members are drawn from the group, including lawyer Mohammed Jazil and pollster Joel Searby. Anne MacDonald, the former chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush, serves as an advisor to the group.
With McMullin’s participation, there are now two major-party candidates (Clinton and Trump) and three minor-party candidates (Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party and McMullin, who is registered as an Independent) in the race.
But in order to have a serious chance of winning the presidency, a candidate needs to be on the ballots of enough states to win a majority of 270 electoral votes in the Electoral College. It’s unclear if McMullin will be able to meet that threshold by November. As of this writing, he’s only on the ballot in Colorado, with expedited efforts being made to add him to the ballots of at least a threshold number of states by Election Day.
Johnson of the Libertarian Party is currently on the ballot in 39 states, with the remaining ones expected to join the list before the election. Stein is on the ballot in 28 states, with at least six others expected to be added in the coming weeks.
Out of all the third-party candidates, Johnson has the highest support, with almost enough backing (depending on which poll one looks at) to merit participation in the upcoming televised presidential debates hosted by CNN on September 26, October 9 and October 19.
Whether Johnson or any other candidate besides Clinton and Trump will participate hasn’t been finalized yet, but the deciding nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has determined a 15 percent threshold of support nationally for candidates to appear onstage.
Johnson has won the endorsement of former President George W. Bush’s brother Marvin and has dropped hints of possibly acquiring backing from other members of the Bush family, including both of the former presidents.
Does a third-party candidate have a real shot at being president? Historians can point to Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose-Progressive Party in the election of 1912 as somewhat of a draw for voters (Roosevelt ended up with 27.4 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes.)
Based on the recent past, however, the chances for a third-party candidate are low, although, memorably, Ross Perot did enter the 1992 race and win 18 percent of the popular vote, gaining zero electoral votes and losing to Democrat Bill Clinton.
Some people believe that Ross Perot drew votes away from George H. W. Bush that year, limiting the incumbent Republican to a one-term presidency. For a brief time, Perot was actually leading both Bush and Clinton, with nearly 40 percent of voters’ support in June polls.
He then dropped out of the race the following month after fighting with campaign advisors, only to re-enter the contest five weeks before the election. Perot ran again four years later, but by this time, voters were unimpressed with his disappearing act in the previous race and his unwillingness to campaign around the country in-person.
Perot had some solid points to make, but he wasn’t a natural politician, and he believed he could sway voters to his platform using not much more than a series of long, expensive infomercials that ran simultaneously with primetime TV shows.
Some people believe that as a conservative, McMullin stands a good chance of splitting the Republican vote, thus ensuring that Hillary Clinton is elected president. Some pundits have noted that McMullin’s support in Utah and a few other ‘Red’ states could affect Trump’s standing in a tight race, even if Trump wins the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, which observers say he must do to have a chance of winning overall.
McMullin only needs 1000 signatures to get on the Utah ballot, an amount he’ll likely have no problems achieving. McMullin would be especially well positioned if something were to happen to Trump or if Trump unexpectedly dropped out of the race.
At this point, the widespread unpopularity of both Clinton and Trump leaves a gap that the three other candidates hope to fill. Their chances of victory in the election are virtually nil, but like Ralph Nader in the 2000 race, they could act as a spoiler for one of the two major candidates — most likely in this case, for Trump.
