Evan McMullin, who ran a third-party campaign for president in 2016, announced Tuesday he is challenging Sen. Mike Lee of Utah in next year's midterms.
Since his presidential campaign, McMullin has been focused on bridging political divides and advocating for government reform through Stand Up Republic, a nonprofit he launched alongside his running mate, Mindy Finn, in 2017. He is the latest in a series of political candidates to launch campaigns focused on democracy reform issues.
A Utah native, McMullin, 45, will again run as an independent candidate. In a video announcing his campaign, McMullin said the country has reached a crossroads with "our streets on fire and our temple of democracy desecrated" — a direct reference to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. He also said partisan polarization is preventing Congress from governing.
"Our politics are broken," McMullin said in his campaign announcement. "And it's putting our country in danger. We need leaders who will unite rather than divide. Washington has left us so polarized that we're failing to overcome major problems facing the nation and it has to change."
Because of this polarization, America faces "crisis after crisis that never gets solved," McMullin said, including "forest fires, water shortages, a never-ending pandemic, the high costs of health care and an economy threatened by inflation and an exploding national debt."
McMullin began his career as an undercover CIA officer soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. After about a decade, he left the agency and graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. McMullin briefly worked for Goldman Sachs before getting involved in politics as a volunteer for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012.
He then went to work on Capitol Hill, advising Republicans and Democrats on national security issues. During the Republican presidential primaries in 2016, McMullin became a vocal critic of Donald Trump and left his job to launch his own presidential campaign. At that time, he also changed his political affiliation from Republican to independent.
While he garnered less than 1 percent of the vote nationally in 2016, he received more than 21 percent of the vote in Utah. Still, Lee holds a significant advantage over McMullin as an incumbent who last won re-election, in 2016, with 68 percent of the vote.
Earlier this year, another reform-minded candidate announced his bid for Senate in Wisconsin. Steven Olikara, former chief of the Millennial Action Project, is running as a Democrat in the hopes of challenging GOP incumbent Ron Johnson in next year's midterms.
In Massachusetts, Harvard University professor Danielle Allen is running to be the state's first elected woman — and second Black person — to serve as governor. A Democrat, Allen has been involved in efforts to bolster democracy and civic education.
And at the national level, Andrew Yang, who ran unsuccessful campaigns for president and New York mayor, is launching a new independent political party. Two key tents of the Forward Party are ranked-choice voting and open primaries.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.