How Evan McMullin can be the Trump-Clinton alternative America craves

Finally, true conservatives have their 2016 presidential candidate: Evan McMullin, virtually unheard of until this week, threw his hat into the ring as an independent candidate on Monday.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: McMullin doesn't have the resume one typically associates with top-tier presidential candidates. He's never held elected office. He spent most of his career as a CIA agent, working undercover in the field, including in the Middle East. Then he had a stint at Goldman Sachs, and then worked in policy roles for the House of Representatives, finishing as chief policy director for the House Republican Conference.

This resume makes him underwhelming in that he's not a nationally known figure. But it's also the resume of someone who possesses better character than either of the major party candidates — a low bar, to be sure, but the most important one — and who understands policy and legislation, two important requirements for office. As McMullin himself says, he's a candidate one could vote for without holding one's nose.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As an anti-Trump conservative, I've been saying for a long time that true conservatives should run a third-party candidate. Yes, the fact that we've only been able to find someone who isn't a first-tier political personality bespeaks the political weakness of the #NeverTrump movement (and the corruption of the Republican establishment, which folded before Trump). But putting someone on the ballot who is not grievously unqualified for president because of their maniacal untruthfulness and corruption is a matter of honor.

The idea behind McMullin's candidacy is probably to win Utah and enough mountain states to throw the election to the House, which is a very long shot scenario. Then again, this is the most unusual year perhaps in the history of American politics, one where anything is possible.

I hope Evan McMullin does well. Here's some (unsolicited) advice for his campaign:

He needs to get better in his skin. McMullin and I both went to business school, and in his earliest interviews, I could see immediately the telltale signs of a business school student who was taught to talk through their resume in a job interview. This won't do. He needs to get more comfortable with the cameras, and give tighter answers to interview questions. Getting your message across in the bizarro universe of television, and doing it a way which is appealing, is very, very hard. The worst thing you can do is sound too scripted. If he wasn't Mormon, I'd recommend he down two shots of vodka before his next interview.

He must create a really good social media strategy. In a way, this seems like a silly thing to say. Nobody is actively trying to have a bad social media strategy. But McMullin could use social media to really break through the noise. Create his own mini-BuzzFeed. But the real goal should be to make enough videos that go viral and get his name out there. He should have a team, or a really smart intern, beta-test headlines and scenarios. Videos recounting all the horrible ways Trump and Clinton are awful. Videos recounting what makes America great. Videos with his family. Videos from the campaign trail.

He should finesse divisive issues. For moral reasons, this is obviously not an appealing feature in a candidate, but I'll make an exception here, for two reasons: The first is that McMullin needs to be the candidate of people who are exasperated by Trump's and Clinton's character flaws. A candidate on whom they can project their views, not the candidate of, say, entitlement reform, or even life issues. The second is that as the unofficial candidate of true conservatives, there are some issues on which he should be loud and clear, such as the necessity of limited, constitutional government, but other issues on which he should not take sides in the conservative civil war, such as abortion, lest he stop being the candidate of all anti-Trump conservatives and just become the candidate of a faction within a faction.

Finally, here's a slogan: "Integrity & Common Sense." McMullin should say it every other sentence, and put it on every bumper sticker. That's the ticket against the two candidates we have. Clinton has been transformed by the Bernie Sanders insurgency into a left-wing ideologue. Trump wants to deport all Muslims and thinks Vladimir Putin is America's best friend. Both candidates are congenitally unable to be truthful. Clinton runs a tax-exempt family business built on grifting and influence-peddling. Trump is... Trump.

This is what the majority of Americans who can't stand either of the choices are yearning for: integrity and common sense. McMullin would do well to craft messages on every policy area and finish each sentence with "...and that's just common sense," or "...the American people deserve integrity from their president."

I hope McMullin does as well as the circumstances will allow, and I wish him the best. And I think most Americans of goodwill should, too.