Draper, Utah

Independent conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin is surging in the Utah polls and turning the state into a toss-up contest. But he's still not registering in national polls, even as Libertarian Gary Johnson is garnering about 6 percent of the vote and the Green party's Jill Stein is grabbing about 2 percent. One of McMullin's biggest challenges as a national protest candidate is that he's named on the ballot in just 11 states and is an official write-in candidate in 32 other states.

Still, he hopes to win over many Gary Johnson voters who cannot in good conscience vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Ahead of a rally in Utah this weekend, McMullin outlined three reasons why he's a better choice than the Libertarian party nominee.

First, McMullin pointed out that Johnson is a poor protest vote for those who care about the Constitution. "Gary Johnson is not actually a libertarian," McMullin told TWS at a press event. "He has tax policies that are not libertarian, his stance on religious liberty is not libertarian."

Johnson has called religious liberty a "black hole" and believes the state rightly has the power to coerce a Christian photographer to work same-sex weddings to which she conscientiously objects. His runningmate Bill Weld has pointed to liberal activists like Stephen Breyer as the model of a good Supreme Court justice. McMullin is pro-life, while Johnson believes in a right to abortion. "If Gary Johnson were a real libertarian, I probably would not be in this race," McMullin said.

Second, McMullin pointed out that Gary Johnson is a poor choice for those casting a protest vote on the grounds that neither Trump nor Clinton is fit to be commander-in-chief. "I do believe that I'm prepared to lead this country. I know where Aleppo is. I've been to Aleppo," said McMullin, a former CIA counterterrorism agent. "We need to defeat ISIS."

"There's nothing honorable about not knowing who international leaders are or not being able to say that you respect any of them," he added.

Johnson opposes military action, including bombing and drone warfare, against ISIS. When he was asked what he'd do about Aleppo, the city at the center of the Syrian war, Johnson infamously replied: " And what is a leppo?" When he was asked to name a foreign leader he admires, Johnson drew another blank and said he was having an " Aleppo moment."

Johnson later defended his lack of knowledge by arguing a president can't get the country involved in a war in a foreign country he couldn't find on the map.

That explanation will likely satisfy only the most dovish voters. But many non-interventionist libertarians could be turned off by McMullin's hawkish foreign policy. McMullin has taken a strong anti-Assad line. Asked in an interview Saturday with TWS if the fall of Assad could end up strengthening ISIS, McMullin replied that Assad has already "left an entire country as a vacuum for ISIS. That's what he's created--an environment in which ISIS has thrived. He's done what you're talking about. He is a brutal dictator who has created an environment across an entire country in which ISIS is thriving. He is one of the primary causes of ISIS's empowerment as well as the refugee crisis, which is the largest humanitarian disaster since World War II."

McMullin said if Assad fell, then "our moderate friends on the ground, who we've done a terrible job supporting, they would then be able to fight a one-front war instead of a two-front war. Now they're fighting ISIS and Assad. If Assad was gone, then the Turks ... everybody who's involved on this effort more-or-less on our side, their interests would be even better-aligned. Right now, they're not. The Turks and essentially everybody in the region we depend on for success in this fight--if we were to ever get serious about it--they don't trust our strategy.... They don't trust our comitment to defeating ISIS, and a lot of that is all about Assad. They say, look, you can't defeat ISIS, you can't solve the humanitarian crisis without getting rid of Assad."

McMullin has never held elective office, but the 40-year-old former top congressional advisor and CIA agent has made it through his brief campaign without committing any embarrassing gaffes so far, which is something the former New Mexico governor can't say about himself.

Third, McMullin is honest about his longest-of-longshot odds, but he argues that "our strategy is much smarter" than Gary Johnson's because "we're in this to win Electoral College votes." Right now, some new polls show McMullin in a dead heat in Utah with Trump and Clinton. Johnson, on the other hand, is not currently in serious contention to win any state. And as Benjamin Morris wrote recently at FiveThirtyEight.com, McMullin has a small chance of throwing the election to the House of Representatives if he can win Utah:

It would take a fascinating scenario — in which much of the technical detail of how we select presidents comes into play — for McMullin to be sworn in as the 45th president, but the chances of its happening are slim, not none. Indeed, his chances of at least making things very interesting may be as high as 1 to 3 percent — about the same as the odds of the Cubs' coming back to beat the Giants on Monday.

Even if the election is thrown to the House, the odds of stopping Trump there are even smaller. A vote for McMullin or Johnson at this point is more about sending a message than electing either man president, but for many voters appalled by both Clinton and Trump, even a 1-in-1,000 chance of stopping them both is better than nothing.