In a just world, every left-leaning commentator who made a joke in 2012 about Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” would be teleported to Utah for the waning moments of Evan McMullin’s Quixotic campaign to become the first third-party presidential candidate to win a state since George Wallace in 1968. There on the trail, from his hometown of Provo to Richfield to Cedar City, those who sneered at the atavistic gender values of Mormons would be startled to discover a 40-year-old candidate and his 36-year-old female vice presidential partner drawing enthusiastic applause for their repeated insistence that, contra the values embraced by Donald Trump, “all men and women are created equal.”
At a brisk rally Saturday night attended by around 250 people in the southwestern Utah city of St. George, McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, repeatedly quoted and referenced the Declaration of Independence while stressing that their proposed “new conservative moment” would be centered on “liberty and equality.” Along with a strong emphasis on states’ rights—always a crowd-pleaser in a religiously idiosyncratic state in constant conflict with the federal government over land use—the McMullin/Finn defense of pluralistic values against the degradations of Trump was by far the biggest emphasis, dwarfing treatment of such issues as national security and abortion.
“We should never have a religious test in this country,” McMullin said from the stage, with a note of exasperation. “An attack on one citizen…is an attack on all of us.” Both candidates reserved some of their sharpest outrage for politicians who lacked the courage to defy Trump’s collectivist vulgarity. “We need to stop relying on leaders that didn’t have the courage to stand up for us,” he said, in one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
In their campaign RV after the speech, I caught up with McMullin and Finn to hear their sales pitch to voters skeptical of government power. While the conversation started with discussion of federalism, reforming entitlements, and more strictly interpreting the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and continued into some perhaps-surprising territories of opposing bulk metadata collection and the Iraq War (the latter at least in retrospect), the subject kept returning to the intolerable outrages of a Trumpified GOP. “A lot of the people in the party, people like us, people who are gravitating toward our campaign,” Finn said, “they don’t want any part of a party that normalizes bigotry.”
McMullin and Finn are both Marco Rubio conservatives—each supported the Florida senator in the primaries, citing his positions on national security and inclusiveness. But they have a more circumspect approach toward government power than many of the Washington neoconservatives who have championed their campaign. Whether they have put themselves in position to influence a post-Trump Republican Party is still very much an open question, but compared to the statism of the major-party candidates, theirs is a welcome addition to a dreary if interesting political season.
The following is an edited transcript of our conversation: