“This is completely unique,” Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, said in an interview. Now, McMullin is confronting Lee, 51, in an unusual Senate campaign that will test whether there are enough Democrats, independents, and anti-Trump Republicans to elect a “Never Trump” conservative to the Senate. By 2020, Lee referred to Trump as Captain Moroni, a revered figure in the Book of Mormon, while later working to help craft a legal strategy to overturn Trump’s failed reelection bid.

McMullin, 46, a former undercover CIA officer and House Republican staffer, launched an organization for disaffected Republicans to air grievances about how a former TV celebrity had rewritten the principles of their party. Then, Lee threw his support behind McMullin, a fellow Utah native running a long-shot independent presidential campaign.Īfter Trump won the presidency and began remaking the Republican Party in his own image, the paths of the two men diverged.

It was the fall of 2016 when Lee bluntly called on Trump to end his bid for the White House, following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which the GOP nominee spoke crudely about groping women.

Radically different choices that both men made six years ago – surrounding the former President – still hang over this Senate race in deep-red Utah.

Get up to speed on the fight to control the US Senate Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaks to reporters at a campaign event in Gwinnett, Georgia, in September.

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