How hard did the Libertarians have to try to blow it this badly?

They were in a fabulous position a couple months ago — what with the horrible nominations from the 2 major parties — and Johnson and Weld threw it away.

Between "What's Aleppo?" and Hillary Clinton is "reliable and honest," they made the Libertarian option less attractive than Evan McMullin, and I don't even know who his running mate is. Mindy something.

"Vetting a former spy for the nation’s highest office isn’t easy, considering the classified nature of his government service."

"This has left McMullin vulnerable to attacks he cannot publicly address. But I interviewed six former CIA officers who worked with McMullin during his 10 years inside the agency. What emerged was a picture of a young case officer who volunteered for duty in the world’s most dangerous places and had a unique talent for recruiting members of extremist organizations as assets.... His campaign has garnered national press attention, but McMullin himself had avoided much scrutiny until polls this month showed him virtually even with Trump and Hillary Clinton in Utah. Then the attacks began.... Political professionals and pundits often lash out at what they don’t understand; for them McMullin, who spent most of his career in the shadows, is an enigma...."

From "Inside Evan McMullin’s 10 years undercover in the CIA," by Josh Rogin.

(And, yeah: garnered.)

Consider McMullin: "We're building something new.... And this new movement is what we need."

Text here. Excerpt:

MIKE MURPHY: All right. So, I think it's an awful choice as an anti-Trump Republican between the malevolence of Trump and the distrustworthiness of Clinton. But the practical effect if you carry Utah, and I think you might, will be to give her a big electoral advantage. Are you okay with that lesser evil winning.... if that means stopping Trump?

EVAN MCMULLIN: Everybody wants us to, to think about this election in terms of this binary choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Look, if we keep--

MIKE MURPHY: But that's the choice we have.

EVAN MCMULLIN: Well, no. If we keep casting our votes for leaders like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump because we only accept that those are the only two real options, as many would say, then we're going to get-- we're going to keep getting more Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We need to finally take a stand in this country. Voters are sick and tired of the options they're being given by the two major parties. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump personify the leadership crisis that we're having in this country. We're standing up. We're building something new.... And this new movement is what we need.

MIKE MURPHY: So it's a vote for--the future to make a statement, although the raw politics of it are it probably helps the--...

EVAN MCMULLIN: If the race-- if the race is close, we can block them both. And if no one was doing that, we wouldn't have this chance.

The idea is that if he gets one state, Utah, and it prevents either Clinton or Trump from getting a majority of electoral votes, it will throw the election to the House, and he will be one of the options and the best solution. 

Why not Evan McMullin?

"Evan McMullin’s Moonshot White House Bid Has Utah’s Attention" (NYT).

"How Evan McMullin Could Win Utah And The Presidency/It’s unlikely, but far from impossible" (FiveThirtyEight).

I don't have the option of voting for Evan McMullin. The ballot I'll be marking here in Wisconsin looks like this:



3 of those names I'm completely unfamiliar with. Anyway... we could write in McMullin.