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Evan McMullin crosses his legs, exposing pink-striped socks under his jeans, and pops open an orange LaCroix.
He’s in the back seat of a Honda Pilot parked under the water tower at Thanksgiving Point.
The independent U.S. Senate candidate spends most weekends traveling across Utah, meeting voters and fielding questions.
“Let’s get some Coldplay. My answers would be a lot better if we were listening to Coldplay,” McMullin tells the driver, Kelsey Koenen Witt, who handles communication for his campaign. The British alternative band has been his go-to listening for years, he said
McMullin’s first stop on this day in late August is at a home in suburban Lindon, which stretches from the shore of Utah Lake to the base of Mount Timpanogos.
Koenen Witt has game-planned with him for how he might sneak away from the Lindon gathering into an upstairs room for a live interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta.
They’ve done this before — run an underdog campaign against a Republican he sees as a threat to democracy, that is.
In 2016, during his hurried run for president, McMullin’s drink of choice was Diet Coke — a trope for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like himself. Nowadays, the Senate candidate sips seltzer water between campaign stops.
And the fuel for his Senate race isn’t the only way he’s evolved since being KO’d six years ago. He’s also shifted his target audience. When McMullin launched the presidential campaign, he aimed to be the candidate for “principled conservatives” who didn’t want to cast their vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
This time around, he’s running to unite Utah Republicans and Democrats against what McMullin sees as a common enemy between the warring parties: “extremism.”
“The extremes that threaten the future of our republic have forced the rest of us to say, well wait a second, you know, maybe we have far more in common than we thought we had,” McMullin said from the back seat. “Those of us who look at Jan. 6, for example, and say, that’s unacceptable, we can’t have something like that in America — I think we’re doing a lot more listening to each other now to find a healthier way forward.”
‘Well, somebody has to’
A Provo-born congressional staffer and former CIA officer with no name recognition at the time, McMullin seemed an unlikely presidential candidate in 2016. But he was part of a circle of Republicans who were becoming increasingly worried about the two options America’s major political parties had put forward.
At the time, even rookie Utah senator Lee worried about a Trump presidency, voting in 2016 for the hometown candidate and fellow Latter-day Saint. Lee has since cast his lot with the twice-impeached former president.
To run for president, McMullin quit his job as a congressional staffer, leaving him without health insurance. He became a target for vitriol from the Trump supporters, and at a Florida rally after the election, Trump gave him the nickname “McMuffin” — a joke McMullin first made about himself. While their public personas and demeanor couldn’t have been more different, McMullin’s policy beliefs on popular conservative issues didn’t stray too far from the Republican nominee.
“Obamacare has failed American families, driving up costs and reducing access to quality healthcare,” McMullin wrote on his 2016 campaign website, using language aligned with the GOP.
The messaging about his conservative bonafides continued with his stand on abortion.
“From conception to death — and any time in between — life is precious and we have a responsibility to protect it….