42 United States The Economist May 7th 2022
Evan McMullinv extremism
A
mid the horrors of the 2016 presidential election, Evan
McMullin offered a moment of relief. The former ciaofficer
and Republican congressional staffer had watched in horror as his
party traded its principles for Donald Trump. When it became
clear that no Republican leader would resist him, Mr McMullin
launched an independent run of his own. He entered the race just
three months before the election, with little namerecognition or
money, yet won half a million votes in the 11 states where his name
was on the ballot (and over 200,000 writein votes where it
wasn’t), including a fifth of the total in his native Utah. The state’s
senior Republican senator, Mike Lee, voted for him.
Now Mr McMullin has Mr Lee in his sights. His protest vote
long forgotten, the senator has become an arch Trump toady and
conspirator. A Mormon, like most Utah Republicans, Mr Lee has
compared the former president to a mythical Mormon hero, Cap
tain Moroni. Text messages leaked last month suggested that the
senator was up to his neck in Mr Trump’s effort to steal the 2020
election. Few Republican politicians have fallen further into the
Trumpist mire. So Mr McMullin is standing against him at the
midterm elections in November. “Utah is a state founded by my
ancestors in the mid1800s and many others who fled persecu
tion,” he told Lexington. “We know the value of our system of self
government better than many. We cannot be represented by some
one who is trying to destroy it.”
He is again running as an independent, but with a couple of
differences. In 2016 he sought to rally his fellow conservatives
against Mr Trump for the sake of conservatism and the country. He
was for gun rights and against federal efforts to cut greenhouse
gas emissions. Yet, having apparently concluded that conserva
tism is beyond saving, he is now trying to woo moderates of all
parties and none. “A majority of Utahns want to replace Mike Lee
but they are divided between political factions,” he says. “Our
strategy is to unite them into a single voting bloc.”
So far, it is working. Though Utah’s conservatives are less resis
tant to Mr Trump than they were, a minority still back Mr McMul
lin. They might include the state’s other senator, Mitt Romney,
who has suggested he will not endorse either his Republican Sen
ate colleague or Mr McMullin, because both are “friends”. EvenbetterforMrMcMullin, Utah’s Democrats voted on April 23rd not
to field a candidate against him.
A twohorse race could be tight. Mr Lee’s approval ratings are
poor and the senator could be further bruised by next month’s Re
publican primary, at which his secretive role in Mr Trump’s post
electoral machinations will receive fresh scrutiny. This is a re
markable development in a state that has not had a competitive
Senate race since 1976.
Mr Lee’s campaign is naturally trying to define Mr McMullin as
a shifty opportunist. In response, the challenger presents his
change of tack as a recognition that politics is now less a struggle
between right and left than between extremism and moderation.
He makes a compelling point. Mr Trump is unrestrained, has no
ideology and his party is in thrall to him. By contrast, the Demo
crats are a broad ideological coalition, including conservatives
such as Joe Manchin and democratic socialists, which accepts
compromise and restraint, however grumblingly, as its only
means to stick together. The rise of Joe Biden, an ageing moderate
whom few Democrats love but most can live with, is emblematic
of the party’s pragmatism.
So is the decision of Utah’s Democrats to tacitly embrace Mr
McMullin (at the urging of the state’s most recent Democratic con
gressman, Ben McAdams). All the more so, it might seem, because
Mr McMullin has not significantly revised his conservative views.
Three of his five priorities—cutting government waste, keeping
America safe, and protecting air and water—are standard Republi
can talking points. And the other two, strengthening democracy
and reducing healthcare costs, are hardly leftwing. It is a re
minder that Democrats and moderate Republicans, a dwindling
but extant species, could govern together perfectly well if their fa
natical colleagues would only allow it. Indeed, in Utah, which has
a strong tradition of bipartisanship despite its conservatism, they
quite often do.
The arrangement looks particularly significant given how hard
the Democrats are finding it to win a governing majority on their
own. In the Senate, the fact that most states lean to the right,
though most Americans vote on the left, gives the Republicans a
huge advantage. Senate Democrats have therefore spent much of
the past two years debating possible structural reforms to correct
such anomalies, for example by scrapping the filibuster in order to
grant statehood to staunchly Democratic Washington, dc. Yet to
make any reform they need unanimity, given their paperthin
Senate majority, and their most conservative member, Mr Man
chin, is not on board. Lending Democratic votes to a pragmatic in
dependent such as Mr McMullin in places where Democratic can
didates cannot win looks like a useful secondbest option. It could
give the Democrats a serious governing partner, as Mr McMullin
promises to be, or at least fewer hardright opponents like Mr Lee.Reform by stealth
It is also hard to see what the Democrats could lose from the ar
rangement. Their 35% share of the vote in Utah—and 40% in Loui
siana and in Missouri and so on—is currently wasted. Many
Democratic voters therefore do not bother to turn out in such plac
es, making it difficult for the party to win the downballot contests
that it otherwise might. Providing its supporters with a novel win
ning option, albeit in the form of an independent candidate,
should help the party correct this. “I do believe thatthisis a model
for defending our democratic republic from theantidemocracy
farright,” says Mr McMullin. He may just be right.nLexington
A former Never Trump Republican is testing a new defence against the populist right