CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Rina Shah, a Beckley native and West Virginia University graduate, would like her fellow West Virginians to know they have a conservative alternative to Donald Trump.
Shah is the chief spokeswoman for Evan McMullin, a 40-year-old former CIA operative and congressional staffer who is running for president.
“We are a real, viable option,” Shah said in a Saturday telephone interview. “We know Evan has the principles, he has the background, he has the temperament to execute the response of the commander in chief.”
McMullin, who announced his candidacy in August, was born in Provo, Utah, and grew up outside of Seattle in a devout Mormon family. He graduated from Brigham Young University, spent two years in Brazil on his Mormon mission and then joined the CIA and began working counter-terrorism operations.
When he returned to the United States, he got his MBA and began working at Goldman Sachs. He eventually landed a job working for Congress for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and then became chief policy director for the House Republican Conference.
Late in the electoral process, after the Republican convention, McMullin decided to quit his job and run as an alternative to Trump. His running mate is Mindy Finn, a 35-year-old Texas native who runs runs Empowered Women, a nonprofit organization that looks to empower women throughout the country.
In West Virginia, McMullin has status as an official write-in candidate for president. McMullin is officially on the ballot in 11 states. He’s an official write-in for 24 more states, including West Virginia.
McMullin’s campaign has picked up steam in the past week or so as Trump’s has hit rocky ground. He’s particularly running strong in his native Utah, normally a GOP state. Just this weekend, the New York Times wrote: Evan McMullin’s Moonshot White House Bid Has Utah’s Attention.
A recent poll by Utah’s Deseret News showed Clinton at 26 percent, Trump with 26 percent, McMullin at 20 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson at 14 percent in that state.
The playbook for McMullin goes like this: win Utah, pull for both Clinton and Trump to be unable to amass the required 270 Electoral College votes, and finally come out ahead as the House of Representatives selects the president.
FiveThirtyEight, which specializes in statistics, calls McMullin the third-most likely person to become president of the United States and estimates he might have as much as a 1 to 3 percent chance.
It’s Shah’s job to get the word out about McMullin.
“We knew this was a challenge when we set out. We don’t deny we’re a longshot,” Shah said. “Crazier things have happened.”
Shah is a 2001 Woodrow Wilson High School graduate and a 2005 West Virginia University graduate. Her father is a doctor in Beckley, and Shah’s mother helps him run his practice.
In the early 1990s, her father helped support a Libertarian candidate for governor. “So I’ve always kind of been keen on politics, interested by it.”
When Shah was at WVU, she worked as a copy editor for the alternative publication, “The Musket,” which was indirectly funded by the Heritage Foundation. That gave her a taste of conservative politics that stuck.
After graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C., and got involved with political consulting.
Shah made a splash this past spring when she was, at first, named a GOP delegate from Washington, D.C., but called Trump a “racist, misogynist flip-flopper.” Shah had backed Senator Marco Rubio until he dropped out of the race. D.C. GOP leaders voted not to certify Shah as a convention delegate, contending that she actually lives in Virginia, not the District — a violation of party rules.
That led to a Washington Post headline: “She criticized Trump. Now she says she’s being driven out as a GOP delegate.”
Shah still maintains all the candidates except McMullin are found wanting. She joined the McMullin campaign within a week of its launch in early August.
#DebateNight stage will show a woman who’s acted above the law & a man who’s talked of sexually assaulting a woman. We, ??, deserve better.
— Rina Shah (@RinainDC) October 9, 2016
In short, according to Shah: Trump “is a liar and a cheat and a con man.” Clinton “is no better.” And Johnson, the Libertarian, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about on foreign policy.”
Like many critics of Clinton, Shah mentions the ongoing controversy of her emails kept on a private server during Clinton’s time as Secretary of State: “The fact that she thought it was OK to use a private server — that compromises our national security.”
On Trump, Shah’s areas of criticism are wider, longer — and still evolving.
“We thought he was going to implode; we knew it was coming. This can’t be the end of it. As that happens, there’s a door created for us.”
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Shah objects not only to Trump’s recent controversies over his treatment of women but also to his policies and attitudes toward minorities and immigrants.
“We have to reject the hateful, divisive rhetoric he was putting out there,” she said. “He almost dinged every person whether they were disabled, communities of color — generally about Mexicans. He sort of, with a broad stroke, said they’re rapists. That was wrong to me. Then the Muslim ban. By saying members of an entire religion should be banned is very dangerous.”
Shah, who was a Mitt Romney supporter four years ago, found herself identifying with other conservatives who became known as #NeverTrump.
“So many of us have felt homeless this year,” she said.
“I was in a very small faction — those of us who consider ourselves center-right, fiscally conservative, socially conservative. A bunch of us banded together and said we could have done better than this.”
Shah remains attuned enough to her home state to know West Virginians are expected to vote for Trump in large numbers. A MetroNews West Virginia Poll released in early September showed Trump at 49 percent, Clinton with 31 percent, Libertarian Gary Johnson at ten percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at four percent. Six percent were not sure. The poll didn’t take McMullin’s campaign into account because it had just begun.
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“West Virginians are such good, hard-working people,” Shah said. “I just get choked up about it because they are such good people. They are my people. I am lucky to have such wonderful parents and a brother and a sister who remind me about what people are going through at home — losing jobs, having a hard time paying the bills. We have to lift each other as a community.
“The jobs are gone. I think they’re disappearing, and when you don’t have work you get down in life. It’s detrimental to one’s psyche. With all that disappearing, West Virginians have lost some hope and they haven’t had people give it to them, especially from Washington.”
And that situation, Shah said, has created an opening for Trump.
“When you have a guy marching into town to tell you he’s going to make everything better again, how can you not get behind him? Unfortunately, there’s a dark side of that that doesn’t get exposed in this age of sensationalism and fakery. They don’t realize he’s a con man.”
For Shah, the alternative is McMullin. There are only three weeks left until Election Day, so she’s trying to generate support wherever she can.
“Do the right thing and vote your conscience,” she said.
“There are conservatives who are so frustrated with Trump. Take an honest look at us. We are what the Republican Party should have put up, a principled option.”