Is Evan McMullin married? Does Evan McMullin have children?

In 2016, a white nationalist supporter of Donald Trump launched a robocall smear campaign against independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, attacking his status as an unmarried man.

“Evan is over 40 years old and is not married and doesn’t even have a girlfriend,” the ad targeting about 200,000 Utah residents said, among other things.

McMullin said then that he was aware that people in Utah wondered why he was not married given the importance his church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, places on marriage. He also said his greatest aspiration was to be a husband and father.

The 46-year-old former CIA operative became both last summer standing on a mountain at Sundance resort in Utah.

McMullin married Emily Norton, a mother of three boys and two girls — Logan, 15, Gavin, 12, Colin, 9, and 7-year-old twins Brynlee and Maylee — whose husband died of brain cancer in 2016. The transition from years of bachelorhood to instant family has, by all outward appearances, gone well.

“I think I’ve been ready for it for a long time. It was much harder to do that (be single) than it is this, frankly. That’s a long time to be alone,” he said.

While he settles into his new life, McMullin is taking on two-term Republican Sen. Mike Lee, a staunch conservative who has the backing of former President Donald Trump. Lee actually voted for McMullin during his late-hour, anti-Trump campaign for president six years ago before embracing Trump. Running again as an independent, McMullin is proving more competitive than Lee’s Democratic general election opponents in past elections.

Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

Climb every mountain

McMullin met Emily Norton on a dating app for Latter-day Saints in the spring of 2020. The fact that he likes to hike caught her eye. Their first date came on the trail to Horseshoe Falls in the hills above Alpine. At least 20 more hikes ensued over the next year, including climbs to Box Elder Peak, Lone Peak, Mount Peale and Mount Tukuhnikivatz.

Their biggest hike came in Titcomb Basin in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, a 35-mile trek that had the couple pulling each other along while watching out for bears. McMullin concluded that if they could do that, they could do anything.

McMullin proposed on one knee on Grandeur Peak, east of Salt Lake City.

On a recent afternoon at the McMullin home in Highland, the kids showed off their piano skills, from Maylee delicately playing “Dance Theme and Variation” to Gavin’s mood-setting “Jazz Reflections” to Logan pounding Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor without sheet music. (All five play the piano.)

Apparently, music isn’t the only thing at which they excel.

“They’re all pretty shrewd Monopoly players,” McMullin said.

McMullin said the family, which includes an Aussiedoodle named Ruby and a Rhodesian ridgeback named Moose, has undergone what he called the normal adjustments and challenges to their new life together, but it hasn’t been as difficult as it could have been.

“I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be,” he said.

Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

‘Very, very alone’

McMullin, a BYU graduate who grew up in Washington state, spent much of his 20s and 30s working in a way that made it difficult for him to date, let alone get married. He spent 11 years in the CIA, often going undercover to hunt down terrorists in hostile foreign locations, including Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He said he was “very, very alone” and went long periods of time when not even his parents knew where or who he was.

“He wakes up and he’s in harm’s way. The type of people he was going after hate Americans,” said Michael Taylor, a former CIA operations targeting officer who identified and located terrorist cells and networks and relayed that information to clandestine operatives overseas like McMullin.

“Evan was a fighter. There’s no doubt that he was forward in the foxhole, finger on the trigger, as we say,” Taylor said.

As McMullin worked to meet assets and gather intelligence, often putting him in dicey, life-threatening situations, he never became flustered or worn out from the constant stress, Taylor said, adding he had an uncanny ability to stay calm.

“I’ll say this, it’s something that they’ve noticed in elite athletes. Under the pressure they become sharper and that’s true for the Tom Bradys of the world, but they don’t all play sports. I think Evan’s got whatever that is,” Taylor said.

McMullin said he ultimately finished his CIA service in 2010 because he realized he would never have the chance to become a husband and father if he stayed in.

It would take another decade, during which he earned an MBA, advised Republicans and Democrats on national security issues, and co-founded a nonprofit called Stand Up Republic before he would meet his future wife. Apparently, unbeknownst to each other at the time, they attended the same Latter-day Saint congregation in Jerusalem 20 years ago while she was a BYU student and he was with the Defense Department.

“It took longer than I would have liked for me to meet Emily, but she’s what I held out for,” he said.

Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

A new campaign

Logan, a high school sophomore who’s into wrestling and has “maybe a little” interest in politics, says it would be “pretty cool” to have a senator for a dad.

Emily McMullin said she was vaguely aware of McMullin running for president in 2016, but as a newly widowed mother of five children age 8 and under she was in survival mode. Shortly after the funeral, she moved from Arizona to Utah to be near a brother-in-law.

The couple had some discussions about McMullin running for office again as their relationship developed. “But it was more of a theoretical conversation,” he said.

It’s real now, and what Politico described as the “strangest Senate race in America.”

And it also can be scary.

Just last month it came to light that a man driving a truck faces charges for allegedly threatening McMullin and his wife with a gun as they drove home from a campaign event in April. The man’s Facebook page contains far-right memes, some promoting political violence.

McMullin said in court documents that his family has had to take increased security precautions since the incident.

McMullin and some of Utah’s top Democrats convinced the Utah Democratic Party to drop its own candidate to back his independent run at Lee — an unprecedented move in Utah politics, perhaps anywhere. McMullin has gone hard after Lee, especially on his role in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

McMullin said he started to evaluate running against Lee early in the summer of 2021 and made the final decision about a month before launching his campaign in October of that year.

“In the fall, it became fairly clear that this was the thing to do,” he said.

Looking at where…