Hello from Washington. I'm Chuck Todd, a special edition of the media press this Sunday. We're going to feature some of our best interviews from the Chuck Todd cast. My first guest is Evan McMullen. He's the independent candidate, former Republican who's challenging Republican Mike Lee for one of Utah's Senate seats. In 2016 he was the independent candidate for president qualified in about a dozen ballots.

And I started out by asking him about his experiences in that last race.

We finished with 21.5% support.

And at a time, there was a time when we were actually leading in the polls, but 13% of the electorate then switched over and voted for Donald Trump, even though they preferred us. And we finished with 21 and a half percent. But that wasn't bad for three months and very little in terms of campaign resources.

How many ballots were you able to get on besides Utah's?

Or was Utah the only one? I think we appeared. My name appeared on 13 states ballots. And we were, I was a registered right in in another 30 or so. So we were, you could, you could cast a vote

and have it count in most states in the country in 2016.

All right, let me try to guess as to why somebody who liked you ended up voting for Trump back in 16.

Was it a certain vacant Supreme Court seat that did it?

I think it was the Supreme Court in general.

I think it was, you know, it was very strong opposition in Utah to Secretary Clinton. And those two things

mainly. And, and that's what happened. You know, when you're running as an independent,

especially in a three-way race, there's a dynamic that political scientists refer to as the

spoiler dynamic. And that is where people may prefer you the independent, but they're

more worried about the candidate on the other side of the aisle that they dislike most. And so they

will vote for someone they don't prefer in order to prevent the person that they most dislike from

winning. So that dynamic doesn't exist in our race now in

Utah, but it did in 2016. What's really remarkable to me about the failure of independent

candidacies in general is that the market, when you do the market research, you sit there and

think, oh my God, there's such a market out here for this. This is exactly what people want.

You know, as a friend of mine said, you don't go to the clothing store and just pick between small and large, right? You'd like some Canada Cs that fit you better. I'd like a medium. I'd like an extra large. I'd like an extra small. Whatever it is. Right. And yet voters have convinced themselves that they have to pick the lesser of two evil

parties, that they have almost been programmed.

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