It's going to be an ugly night. Let's not have any more of them.

This is the first election night since 2004 I haven't spend in a hotel ballroom somewhere. It's the first since 2002 I've spent at home.

It's good to be near a source of cheap beer and not have to feel the emotions I expect to feel tonight in the company of others,

I am fairly confident that Hillary will win. This will happen solely due to the fact that a plurality of the Republican primary and caucus participants decided to throw a tantrum rather than present the electorate with a viable alternative to her. What will happen tonight and in the next four years did not have to happen. It's an irony and a tragedy that will be hard to deal with.

I am torn between hoping for a close outcome that sees Evan McMullin carry Utah and throws  the election into the House of Representatives- thereby preserving the last, longshot chance for a positive outcome for 2016- and pulling for the biggest possible blowout. Trump and his movement need to be crushed. There is no place for a movement based on hatred and bigotry and authoritarianism in American politics. And if the party of my father has any chance of surviving as a viable force in this nation it needs to spend the next four years purging itself in every way of Donald Trump and all his works. And I'm afraid I don't see that happening.

The alternative within the Republican party seems, based on the results of this cycle, to be a shrill, extreme, divisive tendency that is nothing more or less than the mirror image of the Democrats and what Hillary Clinton stands for. It's not just that America deserves better. It needs something better.

But I can't control my former party. I'll blog as the evening goes on and the pattern of events becomes clearer. But I plan to spend the next four years working to build something new: a conservative movement with both a heart and a mind that can be worthy of the trust the Republican party betrayed this cycle. We need a movement that will not only break with Trumpism but with Ted Cruz and Hillary stand for, too. We need a movement that appeals to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," that aims to unite rather than divide, that attempts to promote dialog rather than confrontation.

Yet that movement cannot simply be a namby-pamby, why-can't-we-all-just-get-along chorus of kumbaya singers. It has to stand firmly and immovably for decency and against the indecency that runs so rampant in our system. It has to stand for life. It has to stand for stable families. It has to stand for religious freedom. It has to stand against racism, and against every other form of hatred and prejudice on both the Left and the Right. It has to stand for what America has always stood for, and what in various ways both of our parties have forgotten and abandoned.

Such a movement- which I expect will require a new, permanent third party to grow out of the McMullin campaign- must succeed if America is going to survive.