ABC News(NEW YORK) — New independent candidate for president Evan McMullin said his entrance into the race won’t affect Donald Trump’s chances because “it’s so likely that Donald Trump will lose” anyway.
A former CIA operative, McMullin is billing himself as a conservative alternative to Trump.
“He’s not a credible candidate,” McMullin said of Trump on ABC’s “This Week.”
“It’s so likely that Donald Trump will lose…my entrance into the race doesn’t affect that,” McMullin told ABC’s Martha Raddatz.
A new NBC/WSJ/Marist poll released Friday showed that Trump is trailing rival Hillary Clinton by double digits in key battleground states.
McMullin, who threw his hat into the ring on Aug. 8, said he’s more qualified than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in battling terrorism.
“I’m the only candidate in this race that has any firsthand experience in fighting terror,” he said. “Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I think, have proven in different ways that they’re unprepared for that challenge.”
The conservative candidate said he “absolutely” has a chance of winning, but acknowledged that it would have been better if someone with wide name recognition had entered the race earlier.
“I fully acknowledge that it would have been much better if someone with national name ID had gotten into this race six months ago,” he said.
“As I waited and as millions of Americans waited for that to happen, it became clear at this — at this last stage of the race, the general election, that if somebody didn’t make a move soon, that all hope would be lost.”
McMullin was born in Utah, a typically conservative state where Trump said this week he’s having a “tremendous problem” with support. Conservative supporters of McMullin hope his ties to the state mean he could eke out at least a win there.
McMullin dismissed the chances of other third-party candidates, saying the Green Party’s Jill Stein is a “single-issue” candidate and that Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is not a “credible option.”
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