Evan McMullin and Write-In Presidential Candidates

In case you haven’t yet heard, former CIA officer and House Republican policy director Evan McMullin has launched an independent campaign for President.

I’ll just go ahead and state the obvious—McMullin doesn’t have a chance of winning the election. Filing deadlines for ballot access will have already passed in roughly half the country by the end of the week, and even if he wanted to mount a legal challenge to those deadlines his campaign would be spending a crucial part of the election bogged down in court. The most likely result will be that he will be waging a write-in campaign in the majority of the country, a tactic that almost never ends well.

(There are exceptions—Lisa Murkowski won reelection as Alaska’s senior Senator in 2010 through a write-in campaign after losing the Republican primary, but she was already an incumbent with high name recognition. Almost no one had heard of McMullin before Monday. If an independent effort by a first-time candidate with no name recognition was to have a chance of influencing the election, it would have had to begin months ago.)

In addition, he has yet to earn any high-profile endorsements or significant financial backing. If people like Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, or the Koch brothers were to become seriously involved with the campaign, McMullin might begin earning more votes and making a bigger impact, but until something changes that looks unlikely.

This isn’t to say that any vote for McMullin is automatically a vote wasted because he can’t win—although Gary Johnson has a better chance of making an impact on the race, he has almost as little a chance of winning. This election, every voter needs to chart their own course and follow their conscience. And I’m sure McMullin has better principles and character than either Trump or Clinton (not, admittedly, a very high bar).

But when a candidate will likely only secure ballot access in a handful of states, has no significant backing, and enters the race only three months before Election Day, the question needs to be asked: Why does this candidate deserve my vote more than one of the third party candidates already on the ballot, or even one of the countless other possibilities for write-in candidates? Is this a serious effort to win, or just the addition of one more name to the nearly infinite list of choices to write in?

Of course, circumstances can always change. But for now, despite my issues with him, I’m sticking with Gary Johnson.