Utah Democrats endorsed failed independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin’s Senate bid last weekend.
Utah Democrats endorsed failed independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin’s Senate bid last weekend, solidifying the NeverTrump crusader’s place as the liberal pick to unseat incumbent Sen. Mike Lee in lieu of a GOP primary.
“I’m humbled and grateful to the Democratic delegates today for their decision to support this growing cross-partisan coalition,” McMullin said in a statement Saturday.
Taking up the same anti-Trump mantle of Rep. Liz Cheney, who faces a tough re-election bid in Wyoming, McMullin declared Lee “a threat to the republic” whose “extreme partisanship and involvement in a plot to overturn our election are inexcusable.”
Rather than wade into a Republican primary, McMullin launched an independent Senate bid in October while Lee faces an inner-party challenge from two acolytes of the state’s junior Sen. Mitt Romney. The senator elected in 2018 after his own failed presidential campaign as the 2012 Republican nominee has refused to endorse in the race, telling Politico he considers both McMullin and Lee “two friends.”
“I don’t get involved in primaries and I don’t endorse,” said Romney, who, days later would attend a Cheney fundraiser in Virginia.
McMullin drew the endorsement of the United Utah Party earlier this month as the former CIA officer builds an independent coalition to defeat Lee in November, pending the incumbent’s survival in the June primary. Despite a center-right policy platform, McMullin, for all intents and purposes, is a Democrat, working to oust a reliable conservative in the upper chamber while branding Republican opposition as dangerous to democracy itself. McMullin even pledged refusal to caucus with Republicans on Capitol Hill if elected.
“As a senator, he would be accountable to Utahns and to his conscience, not to party bosses or special interest groups which corrupt our politics today,” McMullin Communications Director Kelsey Koenen Witt told the Salt Lake Tribune in a statement published Tuesday. “What Evan is doing is unique, and it is the only way to change our broken politics in Washington and bring better representation to the Senate for Utah.”
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