Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman from Utah, is not running for Senate this year. Nor is he campaigning for another member of his party. In fact, he won’t be voting for a Democrat at all.
Instead, McAdams has spent the past year campaigning on behalf of Evan McMullin, a conservative independent. After McMullin entered the race in late 2021, McAdams began the arduous task of convincing committed Democrats that the best thing they could do for the Democratic Party would be to vote for the former Republican.
“Over the course of five months, I was hosting, at my home, groups of twenty to thirty people,” McAdams said. These get-togethers, which were composed of Utah Democratic party activists, were part of a campaign by McAdams and Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, two of the Utah Democratic Party’s most notable figures, to convince the party not to nominate a candidate for the United States Senate.
“Out of these twenty or thirty people…we’d probably have one person who left still in disagreement,” McAdams noted.
McAdams, a Utah-bred, Columbia-educated lawyer, is polite yet firm, with a mild manner that initially obscures his practical determination and keen political mind. After serving in the Utah State Senate, McAdams won an open race for Mayor of Salt Lake County in an upset.
“When I ran for mayor, I was expected to lose,” McAdams said. “In fact, there was polling the weekend before my race that showed me losing by ten percentage points.”
Six years later, in 2018, McAdams narrowly pulled off an upset and won a seat in Congress, defeating a well-funded Republican incumbent in a heavily Republican district. In 2020, McAdams lost his reelection campaign by just over seven hundred votes.
As the 2022 Senate election against incumbent Republican Senator Mike Lee approached, McAdams knew he seemed like a natural choice for the Democratic nomination.
“I looked at the numbers and knew that if I had run for United States Senate, and it was a three way race with Evan McMullin, Evan and I would have been splitting the same voters . . . a three way race would guarantee Mike Lee’s reelection.”
Instead, in November of 2021 McAdams endorsed McMullin’s candidacy and embarked on a campaign to keep the Democratic Party out of the race. McAdams’s core pitch, that standing aside in favor of McMullin is Democrats’ only chance at defeating Mike Lee, is a gamble with implications that extend beyond Utah.
Born in Provo, UT, in the mid-1970s, McMullin was raised in the Church of Latter-Day Saints (known colloquially as the Mormon Church or LDS), and, like many LDS youth, went on a mission abroad before attending Brigham Young University. McMullin later served in the CIA for eleven years.
“When America was attacked on 9/11,” McMullin recalled in his campaign launch video, “I volunteered to serve undercover in some of the most dangerous places on earth.”
After his tenure in the CIA, McMullin went on to serve as a senior advisor on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2013. In 2015, he became Chief Policy Director for the House Republican Caucus where he worked closely with Republican leadership.
Greg Orman, a Kansas businessman who won over forty percent of the vote running for Senate as an independent in 2014, stressed the value of McMullin’s partisan background. “[McMullin] has the benefit of having been a Republican his whole life, served in the CIA, and ultimately served in the Republican party politics for quite some time,” said Orman.
After three years on the Hill, McMullin bucked the Republican mainstream in 2016 and loudly opposed Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Increasingly dissatisfied with the major party nominees, McMullin announced a run for president as an anti-Trump conservative four months before the 2016 election.
Though he only scored a few hundred thousand votes nationwide, McMullin’s candidacy was supported by many Republican officeholders, including his future opponent, Senator Mike Lee, who voted for McMullin and attacked future President Trump. In the general election, McMullin won over 20 percent of the vote in Utah, vastly outperforming his numbers in other states. As a result, the 2016 election marked the first time a Republican presidential nominee did not win a majority of the vote in Utah since 1992.
McMullin’s overperformance in Utah signaled developments to come. When McMullin announced his candidacy for Senate, few expected the race to be competitive given Utah’s strong support for Republican candidates at the federal level. However, in the years since the 2016 election, Utah politics have diverged from national trends.
On the state level, many Utah Republicans have resisted the bitter partisanship of the Trump and post-Trump years. GOP Strategist Mike Murphy, who is running a super PAC supporting McMullin’s campaign, attributed this unease to the influence of the LDS church.
Utah, he said, has “a strong LDS cultural element, which has always sort of disapproved of Trump.”
McAdams echoed Murphy’s point. “You have seen members of the LDS church who have been uncomfortable with Donald Trump and what he represents… [which is] a marked distinction from Republicans around the country,” he said.
Utah’s tepid reception of Trump is exemplified by one of its most prominent officeholders: Republican Governor Spencer Cox. First elected in 2020, Cox has made a pointed effort to distance himself from the Trump wing of the Republican Party and promote civil dialogue. During the 2020 gubernatorial election, Cox and his Democratic opponent ran a joint advertisement in which they pledged to set an example for the nation by disagreeing respectfully. The Economist’s Lexington column has highlighted Cox’s conciliatory approach, noting that since winning the governorship, Cox has forged compromises across the aisle in a state so heavily Republican that compromise is rarely a necessity. In 2021, he worked towards consensus on Covid regulations and vetoed a bill restricting transgender students’ participation in sports.
Similarly, at the local level, McAdams also found success rallying bipartisan support for an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Salt Lake City.
“Utahns are pragmatic problem solvers. We are Republicans, Democrats, and independents, but at the end of the day, we care about finding solutions,” McAdams said. “We believe that we can sit down at a table and talk with each other. Working on LGBT employment and non-discrimination is a prime example where Utah broke out of the box, and we refuse to accept the dichotomy of us versus them.”
While Utah voters have demonstrated an appetite for a more conciliatory kind of politics, between the summer of 2016 and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, many national “never-Trump” Republicans either embraced Trump’s leadership or faded off the political stage entirely. Several previously Trump-skeptic Senators, including Mike Lee, became vocal Trump supporters. Lee went so far as to compare Trump to Captain Moroni, a revered figure in the LDS Church. McAdams hones in on the moment Lee compared Trump to Moroni as a turning point in the way Utahns viewed Senator Lee.
“There are some people who have been willing to plug their nose and support Donald Trump, but to compare him to a revered religious figure went way too far,” McAdams explained. “For a lot of people’s minds, that crystallized how Mike Lee has changed.”
While Mike Lee has transformed himself from Trump critic to staunch supporter, McMullin has remained consistent in his opposition to the former president.
McMullin’s steady anti-Trump activism has earned him credibility among Utah Democrats. During the small-group meetings he hosted at his home in Salt Lake City, McAdams often invited McMullin to engage directly with the Democratic operatives. Though Democratic activists did not agree with McMullin on every political issue, they recognized they had few other options.
“Liberal Democrat activists are not 100% happy with him, either,” Murphy, the veteran GOP operative, said. “They just think he’s better than Mike Lee.”
At the Utah Democratic Party convention, McAdams’s motion not to nominate a candidate for Senate won 57% to 43%. Many of the detractors acknowledged that the chances of a Democratic victory were vanishingly small, but worried that not running a candidate unfairly denied their supporters an option. Others worried that voters would think the Democratic Party was giving up on tough elections in conservative regions.
McAdams counters that Democratic voters, for the first time in decades, have the opportunity to be part of a winning electoral coalition.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” McAdams argued. “We lose statewide races by 30 to 40%. Every year. To think that something’s going to change, without trying something new, without building a bigger coalition, is naive.”
Without a Democratic opponent, McMullin has the field cleared to his left. In a state as heavily Republican as Utah, McMullin must attract Democrats, independents, and a significant portion of Republicans to win. Though Utah has unique political dynamics, McMullin’s campaign takes advantage of a broader national disillusionment with the two-party system of government.
“The large plurality of Americans have self-identified as being politically independent for the past decade,” said Orman, the Kansas independent. “At the same time, over 60% of Americans have said that they wish we had a viable third party, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. . . . People like Evan McMullin are trying to give voters another choice.”
McMullin has to walk a fine line. Just declaring oneself a political independent is not enough to tap into Americans’ sense of partisan alienation. In fact, voters who claim to want an independent voice are not necessarily of the political center; they are more often united by a disenchantment with the political system as a whole.
Murphy noted, “One thing all independent voters agree on in totality is the system is broken. And when you get them into an issue debate, they start squabbling and heading towards the poles of each party. You have to focus on the big reform idea or you get chewed up. Independent campaigns are not designed to really work in the ‘I’m right, you’re evil’ equation of modern polarized federal politics.”
Beyond ideological challenges, McMullin faces significant logistical challenges as an independent running for office. Independents lack the partisan fundraising systems, data, and networks of operatives available to major-party candidates.
“I think it’s been an added level of difficulty to not have some of the institutional advantages that come from being aligned with a party,” McAdams said. “Everything from a party-organized, coordinated campaign and get out the vote to . . . building a campaign organization without the support of a party. And I think that’s added an element of difficulty.”
Despite these challenges, McAdams thinks that McMullin has “been able to build that apparatus.”
Once unthinkable, a McMullin victory now looks plausible. One of incumbent Mike Lee’s first signs of weakness came in the form of a surprisingly strong primary challenge from former State Representative Becky Edwards, who ran on a platform promoting “productive, inclusive, [and] proactive” politics—a message reminiscent of the McMullin campaign. Lee won the primary, but with only 60% of the vote.
Recent polling shows a single-digit race, with one poll putting Evan McMullin narrowly in the lead. Many polls have McMullin within the margin of error, and a high proportion of respondents are undecided. Because it is a competitive race, the McMullin-Lee matchup has brought political life to areas that have been neglected under a system where one party is so assured of their support that other candidates do not bother to engage.
“We had people from rural Utah, who have never—not even at the local level, or state legislative level or city council level—seen a race where their voice ever mattered, being so enthusiastic for this race,” McAdams said. “It’s a single-digit race. I have not seen that in my lifetime.”
Despite the race’s competitiveness in a reliably red state, it is unclear how much of McAdams and his partners’ strategy is replicable in other states. Utah’s religious, cultural, and political history may set it too far apart from the rest of the United States for it to be an instructive analogue. It may also be that McMullin is too unique of a candidate for his race to be a model for other parts of the country. His experience running for president in 2016, his resume, and his style are all hard to imitate.
Yet McAdams believes that, despite the McMullin-Lee race’s unique characteristics, in certain circumstances his strategy could be relevant elsewhere.
“I think it could be a model for the country, especially in places where extremist politicians win reelection on autopilot,” McAdams explained.
Though McAdams and his partners were instrumental in ensuring Democrats backed McMullin’s campaign, their part in the race is largely over. “I have a less pronounced role today than I did six months ago,” McAdams said. “I still stay in touch with the campaign and support where I can, understanding that the work of building a coalition is necessarily much more broad today.”
McAdams has accepted a backseat role for himself and his party in the campaign and supported a candidate who does not share all of his ideals because he believes that marginal progress through victory is better than ideological purity in defeat.
“Try telling a DREAMer that it’s better to lose than to have a solution for them….Or to say it’s better to lose than to have somebody who can work constructively to implement solutions to the climate crisis,” said McAdams. “All of those things, it’s not better to lose, it is catastrophic to lose.”
McAdams continued, “Saying that it’s better to lose than to compromise our purity is a pretty elitist position taken by people who have the luxury of standing their ground when it means the lack of progress on issues that are important.”
McAdams’s gamble strikes at the existential challenge faced by all opposition parties: compromise their principles in order to win power, or maintain purity in the knowledge that they may not enter government. Whether McMullin wins or loses, McAdams’s strategy is a trial run for minority parties across the country facing this choice.