Current Senator and former Secretary of State Ken Bennett lost his campaign for reelection in the recent primary to hardliner Mark Finchem, following Finchem’s failed 2022 bid for Secretary of State and court fight spuriously alleging that the election had been rigged, which brought him national media attention. We invited former state representative and City Council member Lucy Mason, also a lifelong Republican, to talk with Bennett about his take on conservative values and the future of the Republican Party. This conversation has been edited to available space. — ed.
Values
Lucy Mason: What do you think it means to be a conservative?
Sen. Ken Bennett: The first thing I think of about being a conservative is limited government. How do we empower the individual to solve their own problems? How do we help a family, a community, a faith-based organization? Kind of the last resort is, do we need a government program to step in? I think one of the fundamental differences between liberalism and conservatism is, where do you turn to government? One of the biggest differences I have with Governor Katie Hobbs, who is a nice person, but she’s trained as a social worker. She’s trained that if there’s a problem, you come up with a big-government program and you try to solve it. No matter what government does, it can spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on a program, nothing happens until one person helps another person.
In a nutshell, what conservative values remain good and true for you?
The biggest thing that keeps me going, in and out of office, is family, family first. It’s back to love. I think when God closes one door He usually opens up better ones, we just have to open our eyes and ears and realize where else we can serve and how we can grow. Maybe He closes a door because you’re not growing in that anymore.
What I’m hearing from you is the ‘service’ mentality.
What I’ve tried to be in all the offices I’ve held is a servant-leader. I read a book years ago called Management by Walking Around, and that’s what I did when I was Secretary of State, that’s what I did when I was Senate President, I knew every person’s name on every floor of that building.
But it’s not only that, it’s listening to the public, one-on-one, listening to people who represent maybe another organization coming in and saying ‘Ken, we’ve got a problem here,’ and you sit down with each person and you listen. It’s not just giving time in an office, it’s actually listening.
I think it was Steven R. Covey who said that one of the biggest problems we have in society is that we listen to respond instead of listening to understand, and that is very evident among elected officials and politicians. You and I have both been on the floor of a legislative body, where you debate bills and whatever, and more often than not when somebody stands to speak you can tell that they weren’t listening to the four people before them, they just want to respond and tell you their opinion. As human beings if we were able to listen more to understand instead of listening to respond, I think we could advance many causes.
I completely agree and I think that’s a key point.
Now, that doesn’t mean we have to agree.
No, but you might take away a kernel …
Yes! But at least instead of “you’ve got your opinion and I’ve got mine and I’m gonna try to force my opinion over yours,” maybe there’s thirty percent or forty percent or whatever that we agree on.
Accepting that positive change is needed, should we be thinking in terms of returning to a certain state of normalcy, or is there a new and better normal that conservatives can coalesce around?
I think some of the anger and vitriol and aggressive nature of some Republicans against others that’s creating this civil war within the Republican party is rooted in frustration that people were compromising too much or going along to get along, and I think we have to respect the underlying frustrations. But I hope that very soon we’ll realize that dividing within ourselves to conquer the other part of ourselves, and nominating people who can’t win a general election — we’ve got a lot of key positions where some in our party were so hell-bent to pick the furthest-right person they could find in the primary, and we wind up with not one elected.
A point I think is critical is that we are a two-party system in this nation. We need the Republicans, it can’t just be Democrats. The Republicans are choosing to eat their own and fight against their own, and then lose.
And that doesn’t serve us well. George Washington worried significantly about parties having too much power, and I think we’re experiencing within the Republican party that we’re fighting so much among ourselves that we’re not advancing conservatism to the general public, much as I think they would embrace it if they didn’t see us cutting each others’ heads off to get there.
There’s a certain amount of changing the definition of conservatism in this process, how we see ourselves and how others see us. That’s a big concern. What does a new conservative normal look like?
I hope that very soon the new normal becomes not killing ourselves within the party as if that’s going to advance conservative principles in the larger body of leadership, of government. If the Republican Party is eating its own, then we’re not going to have the numbers or the strength or the reputation or the credibility to govern and be part of advancing society. I believe very strongly that conservatism represents the principles on which good government and good society need to function. So we have to understand that as conservatives we need to operate, both internally and externally, in a way that we’re inclusive, we’re bringing people in, we’re adding to our forces rather than finding reasons to disagree with each other, and then I’m gonna label you a RINO and say ‘you can’t even be in the party.”
What values inform that kind of thinking?
For me, it’s back to the principles I was raised on: love, respect, service, servant-leadership, treating others the way you want to be treated, the Ten Commandments, the Good Samaritan, all the stories that I heard as a child of Christ-like behavior, just operating your life in a way that helps others.
Conflict
Let’s switch now to what happened in Legislative District 1 in this last (primary) election. There was a big surprise across our District that threw us all for a loop. Walk us through that, what happened?
I announced that I was running for reelection in March, and (Mark) Zipperman announced that he was gonna try again and it would be the two of us again. In 2023 the legislative session went to the end of July, and we had to get the budget done by June 30. I tried to explain that we were trying to do something that was unconstitutional, and we rail about how important it is for us as conservatives to follow the constitution, and I said we shouldn’t be hypocrites, but I didn’t vote they way they wanted me to vote on a few bills, and all of a sudden it was announced that Finchem would be moving to Prescott.
I can remember my own majority leader, Sonny Borelli, who I knew was very close to Finchem, was in the back of the Senate floor where my desk is, and I said, kinda jokingly, ‘Sonny, you’re sending Finchem up to run against me.” All he had to do was kinda laugh it off or something and it would have been fine, but he stammered and stuttered, and all he could come up with is, “Yeah, but we can’t understand why the other guy won’t get out of the race.” So he essentially admitted that Republican leadership had sent someone up to take out another Republican.
Everything was going fine, three or four weeks before the ballots went out we had a big poll that said I was up ten points, I was at 30, he was at 19, Zipperman was at 9. I was getting what they were getting combined. But there were still 41 percent undecided. Then, between the first-quarter campaign-finance reporting period and when the primary happened, they raised him a third of a million dollars, mostly out-of-state money. They waited till the last minute and started telling vicious lies about my record, said I supported Satanism, that I voted to protect Satanic statues at the Capitol, that I voted to raise taxes twice, that as soon as I was reelected I was gonna take people’s guns away, that I supported transgenderism for kids and letting boys compete against girls in sports, all total untruths. But they had a third of a million dollars to just beat that lying drum over and over. I had people telling me they were hearing six and seven Finchem radio commercials an hour.
And what happened in the last few weeks?
Well, people just started hearing these terrible, terrible things about Bennett, and every commercial, every brochure, every radio and TV ad pivoted to what a terrible guy Bennett is, and I’m so-and-so and I’m endorsed by Donald Trump. He got thirty of that undecided forty percent, and that’s all they heard.
So Mark Finchem was totally a surprise to you in the District?
He’d only moved up here a year and two days before the election.
Did he buy a house, or what?
No, somebody rented him a little doublewide trailer up off Willow Lake Road.
Did you know him, had you ever had to work with him?
No. I’d watched him when he was a candidate for Secretary of State in 2022. He was okay as a candidate until he and Kari Lake lost. Kari Lake lost by ten thousand votes or something, he lost by 120,000 votes to Adrian Fontes, and then just claimed, ‘oh, I couldn’t possibly have lost, it had to have been stolen.’ He filed several lawsuits that were all deemed to be frivolous, and he and his attorneys were fined tens of thousands of dollars.
In 2010, when I was a brand-new Secretary of State, I had to oversee the only recount in the history of the state up to that point. We had to recount two million votes for an innocuous little proposition that was losing by 126 votes. We counted two million ballots and the result stayed the same; the vote total changed by twelve. So I knew that the system works pretty well. I’d been involved in the audit, where the Cyber Ninjas company recounted 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County alone, and we came up within 300 votes. Elections are not perfect, they’re conducted by humans and humans are not perfect, so there are gonna be mistakes, but there are a lot of checks and balances, and unless you have a pretty significant amount of collusion, which would almost have to be bipartisan, it would be very hard to throw (an election). Our elections are decentralized, each county runs its own elections and gets to decide which election-management system it uses.
So the only knowledge I had, really, about Mr. Finchem was his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, where he clearly lost. I don’t like to say that someone is lying or is a liar, but in this case, this person accomplished what he did by lying about me.
The future
Do you think we can wrap our arms around this in the Republican Party and get back to some sort of normalcy?
I do. I think it involves coming up with responsible and reasonable ways to verify our elections so that we can reinstill in the minds of a lot of people, most of them in our party, that they can have confidence in our elections. It takes good people, and our County Recorder here, Michelle Burchill, is doing that.
When the far-right of our party ran (county recorder) Leslie Hoffman off a couple of years ago, Michelle came in with some kinda preconcieved ideas, very skeptical about dropboxes and some other things. But when she got to looking into it she realized that the protections the County had or could add on the Yavapai County-controlled dropboxes were much better than the hundreds of US Postal Service mailboxes that people could drop their ballots in as well. So I’ve seen her go from being something of a skeptic to now being able to stand up in from of organizations and tell them, ‘Hey, I thought very much like you, now that I’ve been in there, here’s what I’ve observed, here’s how my mind has changed and here’s what we can do better.’
It’s gonna be that kind of progression, related to elections, related to how we pass laws, the state budget, related to everything. To me it’s transparency, trackability, public verifiability, servant-leadership, listening to understand, all the things we’ve talked about. If we can do a better job on all those things, I think we can bring the Republican Party back to a level of normalcy. But not just to go back to when people were skeptical that we weren’t bold enough or whatever. We can be bolder, we can stand for the things that people were frustrated about to begin with, but not do it in a way that we keep losing elections and can’t govern.
