Up North Progressive

There are mornings Up North Progressive kicks themselves in the butt for sleeping in.

In the wee hours of the morning, while the dream fog of Clinton leading Trump by 10 points in the polls faded with the morning light, there stirred a disturbance in the political aether that no one saw coming.

BREAKING FIRST ON @Morning_Joe: Multiple sources say an independent conservative candidate will announce his candidacy for president today.

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 8, 2016

Wait, is this for real?

Anti-Trump Republican Launching Independent Presidential Bid

Evan McMullin would make for an unlikely presidential candidate. He has never held elective office before and has spent most of his career as a CIA officer … McMullin has virtually no public profile. He doesn’t appear regularly on television, and has just 135 followers on Twitter. His most high-profile recent appearance seems to have been a TEDx talk about genocide he gave at London Business School in April.

It is real. He even has a campaign logo and he’s jumped from 135 twitter followers to 5,806.

Here is McMullin’s Tedx talk. Make sure if you decide to watch this there are no hard surfaces with sharp points to hit your head on when you pass out from boredom.

Nobody knows who he is, but he knows who Donald Trump is. His twitter account is full of searing criticism.

Authoritarians like @realDonaldTrump use promises of law & order to justify infringing on civil rights as they consolidate control by force.

— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) July 22, 2016

So far all of McMullin’s commentary on the presidential election are critical of Donald Trump, which would be typical in a primary election, but general elections are about convincing voters to vote for you, not the other party’s candidate.

Evan McMullin has this to say on his late start in the presidential race:

Standing up to run for president because it’s never too late to do the right thing.

What Evan McMullin should know however is in 27 states it is too late to be on the ballot to run for president, and this coming Friday that number will jump to 35. Will he last the week before realizing no one is taking him seriously? For now he’s trending on twitter, and the media is digging into his past to find out all they can about him.

And you thought the highlight for today was going to be Trump’s economic policy speech in Detroit.