It's understandable given the nature of how
shocking the 2016 election was that very few people either at the time or in
hindsight looked at the results in Utah. Because in a state that had gone
Republican for generations Donald Trump underperformed compared to any
Republican Presidential candidate in the 21st century and in fact
worse then any Republican since 1992.
Trump received just under 45 percent of the
votes cast for President in the state of Utah and came the closest of any
Republican to losing the state since LBJ had won it in 1964. The main reason
for that was the presence of a third party candidate.
Evan McMullin had been a CIA operations
officer from 2001 and 2010. He had been a senior adviser on national security
in the House and chief policy director the Republicans from January 2015 to
July 2016. McMullin was so appalled by the nomination of Donald Trump that he
left the Republican Party and ran for President as an independent backed by the
organization Better for America. The most prominent face of the so-called Never
Trumpers, some polls would show him running ahead of both Trump and Clinton in
Utah. While he did not win, he did receive 21.5 percent of the vote in Utah, by
far the highest percentage of the vote any third party candidate in any state
had managed to muster since Ross Perot's historic run for President in 1992.
(Indeed Perot finished second in the popular vote in Utah.)
After his lost McMullin was one of the most
prominent critics of the Trump administration. He publicly endorsed Joe Biden
in 2020. After Biden's victory he was involved in early discussions of forming
a new center-right political party. Then in October of 2021 he put himself to
the test when he announced he would run for the Senate against Mike Lee.
Mike Lee was one of the first early victors
of the Tea Party movement when in 2010 he upset incumbent Bob Bennett in the
Republican primary and won reelection. One of the most prominent opponents of
Trump during the 2016 primary campaign – he famously led a dump Trump movement
at the 2016 Republican convention – he had done far better than Donald Trump
when he had run for reelection that same year, outpolling Trump in the state by
nearly a quarter of a million votes. However, like many Trump critics before 2016
he devoted himself whole-heartedly to Trump in the aftermath of his election to
the White House.
McMullin made it very clear that he was a
voice against 'extremism, dividers or self-serving opportunists'. Despite
receiving endorsements from the Democrats in Utah by March of 2022 as well as
their decision to endorse his candidacy rather then run a Democratic candidate
McMullin made it clear that if elected he would caucus with neither the
Republicans or the Democrats in the Senate. This would be keeping with
McMullin's political positions across the board.
McMullin has been a prominent speaker
against extremism, supports both NAFTA. However he supports cuts of all taxes
including the estate task and cuts to entitlement programs like social
security. He believes in the scientific consensus on climate change and is very
much a hawk on foreign policy, criticizing the international nuclear agreement
with Iran. He is also pro-life and believes abortion policy should be left to
the states, while also believes contraception should be more widely available.
Lastly he believes in the appointment of originalist justices to the Supreme
Court.
Mike Lee was heavily favored to win the
race from the start of the campaign and indeed he did. By the numbers it seems
like Lee won in a landslide getting 53.2 percent of the vote to McMullin's
42.8. But in another sense it showed how much Lee's standing in Utah had
dropped in six years, when he'd won reelection with 68.2 percent of the
vote. McMullin's performance was by far the best by a non-Republican since 1976
when Frank Moss, the last Democrat to hold a Senate seat in Utah was defeated
in reelection by Orrin Hatch. It was also one of the best performances by an
independent candidate for the Senate since the election of Joe Lieberman under
that banner when he won reelection in 2006.
The results of this race didn't get nearly
as much attention as they should have during the last midterm elections but
that is understandable considering that the 'red wave' that everyone other than
Joe Biden had been certain was going to sweep the country didn't happen and it
definitely didn't happen in the Senate where the Democrats managed to make net
gains in the midterms for the first time in 60 years. Yet McMullin's superb
performance demonstrated that in a polarized America and particularly in deep red
states, there was a demand for an alternative to the two party system.
No one knew that just a few months later
circumstances would unfold in Nebraska showing another opportunity for the
voters to show this again.
In 2020 Ben Sasse had been reelected to the
Senate in Nebraska. However just two years later he chose to resign to become
the President of the University Florida. This led to a vacancy which was filled
controversially.
During November of 2022 Jim Pillen had
become the new governor of the states. One week after being sworn in, he chose
to appoint the previous governor Pete Ricketts as Senator. Ricketts had
financially supported Pillen's campaign for governor and despite the denial
there was a certain stench to it.
In 2006 Ricketts had made his first attempt
to get into politics by running against Democrat Ben Nelson for his seat in
Senate. He would outspend his opponents
in the primary by nearly 10 to 1 to win the nomination. Ricketts had run on a
conservative platform and had spent more money than any Senate candidate in the
state's history and was trounced in the election, losing by nearly 28
percentage points to Nelson. However Nelson the most conservative Democrat in
the party at the time, chose not to seek reelection in 2012 and Deb Fischer
would take his seat.
So in 2024 both Senators from Nebraska were
running for reelection. But by this point the Democrats presence in red states
was almost completely gone and it was difficult for them to find candidates to
run in one seat, never mind both. Eventually the Democrats would nominate
Preston Love, Jr who had served as a write-in candidate the previous year when
the nominated Democrat Chris Janicek was found to have sent sexually explicit
text message to a female staffer. Even then Love has received just 6 percent of
the vote to Janicek's 24 percent as Sasse outperformed Trump in Nebraska by the
greatest margin of any Republican candidate that year.
While this was going on Deb Fischer was
facing a different challenge from a very unlikely source.
Dan Osborn had served in the U.S. Navy
after graduation high school serving as a storekeeper aboard an aircraft
carrier. In 2004 he began working as an industrial mechanic at Kellogg's Omaha
plant. He would eventually become the President of the Bakery, Confectionary,
Tobacco Workers and Grain Mullers International Union Local 50G. He rose to
national prominent when he led the 2021 Kellogg's strike at that plant,
prompted by a demand by a two-tier system of pay. It lasted 11 weeks.
After being fired he would turn to boiler
maintenance and repair work as Boys Town and became a member of the
Steamfitters and Plumbers Local. In October of 2023 he announced intention to
oppose Fischer as an independent.. In less than six months he had collected
4000 signatures, enough to be eligible on the ballot.
Osborn has been registered as nonpartisan
since 2004 and while Democrats chose not to run a candidate against Fischer he
declined their endorsement. The Nebraska Democratic Party considered running a
write-in candidate accusing Osborn of misleading them but he made it clear he
wanted to form an independent caucus in the Senate, referring to the current
system 'a two party doom loop." He made it very clear that he thought both
Biden and Trump were too old to run for President (before Biden withdrew) and
he raised more campaign funds, the majority small-dollar donations than any
independent candidate in the state's history.
Even before the turmoil that led to Biden's
withdrawal the 2024 map for the Senate was a nightmare for the Democrats with
few possibilities to make any real pickup.. Perhaps at most they thought if
Osborn did well enough the RNC would funnel money into Fischer's race that they
would take away from races in swing states or possibly Texas or Florida. No one
gave Osborn a chance of winning. And yet by August Fischer held a margin of 39
percent to 38 percent, stunning the political world. As the autumn progressed
the possibility eventually went from Likely Republican to Lean and even tilt
Republican. Polls increasingly said it was too close to call.
Fischer would end up winning by 53 percent
to 46.5. But compared to Rickets, she underperformed him 86,000 votes. It was
by far the worst performance of a Republican in the state of Nebraska since
1970 when Roman Hruska had only narrowly won reelection by 5 percent over
Democratic challenger Frank Morrison.
Osborn by contrast, outperformed Preston
Love by nearly 87,000 votes. More strikingly Osborn's performance was the best
by any challenger for a Republican-held seat in the 2024 election,
including the Democrats attempt to unseat Ted Crus in Texas. It was by far the
best performance of any independent in a Nebraska senate race, including George
Norris, who had won the Senate as an independent in a three-way race. He even
managed to carry two counties in the state that would go for Trump (Thurston
and Sarpy)
During that year Osborn formed a PAC to
support working class candidates. And because of the conditions of Ricketts'
appoint he would have to run for reelection for a full-term this coming
November. This past July Osborn announced he would once again run for the
Senate as an independent, this time against Ricketts.
Like McMullin Osborn's political positions
make it unlikely that either party would accept even were he not insisting on
maintaining his independence. He agrees with raising the minimum wage and
lowering taxes for small business, believes in the legalization and taxation of
marijuana. He supports raising the cap on Social Security contributions
for those with higher incomes and he believes in the right to organize unions.
He supports reforming the immigration system but also increasing border
security and believed in the construction of the border wall. He also believes
firmly in the second Amendment and gun rights, positions which the increasingly
left-wing part of the Democrats would not accept but Nebraskans are in favor. His
position on abortion wouldn't fit either party. While he is personally pro-life
and opposes late -term abortions he also supports Roe V. Wade and opposes a
national abortion ban. He has made it clear he would accept donations from anyone
'whether you're a Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, America
Party'.
While there is some overlap between the
politics of Osborn and McMullin it is clear they both fit the definition of 'independent'. Certainly with the extremists increasingly
taking over the mandate of power major parties its impossible to imagine either
party being willing to caucus with either man. Any one of McMullin's positions
would be too conservative for the Democratic Party in the 2020s and given his
personal break with the Republicans its impossible to imagine them ever
accepting him. Osborn would have
difficulty fitting into either party either: his positions on immigration and
gun rights are too conservative for Democrats and on unions and abortions to
far-left for Republicans.
After his defeat in 2022 McMullin has been
relatively quite in electoral politics. He didn't try to win Mitt Romney's seat
in the Senate in 2024. Perhaps he did not wish to face the wrath of the man he
had so prominently come out against in eight years earlier an forgivable sign
of caution. It is worth noting that while Trump did win Utah yet again in 2024
Harris's margin of 37.8 percent was the highest received by a Democrat since
1964. Despite that John Curtis who succeeded Romney, received 31,000 votes more
than Trump in that state. He also
received nearly 340,000 more votes than Lee did two years earlier. McMullin has
to be aware of that fact going forward.
For decades Americans frustration with the
two-party system has become a constant refrain and this became a din in the
leadup to the 2016 election. It's generally been forgotten that while Hilary
Clinton's win was considered a foregone conclusion in the leadup the overwhelming
majority of the American people were not happy with either candidate. McMullin's
run that year was based on that foundation and it has not gone away in the past
decade. While the move for a major third
party in American increasingly facing obstacles that have become more difficult
to overcome in the 21st century while running for office at a state
level it has less to overcome.
And in so many deep red states where anti-Trump
voters are dismayed by the GOP's loyalty to them and the Democratic Party has
become all but non-existent the success of McMullin in Utah and Osborn in
Nebraska show that a 'third way' is possible and that voters will respond to it
if the right candidate comes along. Whether Osborn defeats Ricketts this
November or McMullin chooses to run again at a state level, their approach has
shown that there is a path forward for those who choose to follow it. If
America does manage to break free from partisan gridlock it will because these
two candidates have shown a path forward, and I hope others follow in their
footstep.
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