Mark Finchem on Aug. 2, 2022, at an election night party for Kari Lake. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Former lawmaker and failed secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem may be heading back to the Arizona Capitol, as early election night results show him leading in his bid to knock off state Sen. Ken Bennett in a northern Arizona legislative district.
Initial election tallies show Finchem with a margin of more than seven percentage points over Bennett, a lead of nearly 2,000 votes.
Finchem spent a decade in the legislature representing districts based in Pima and Pinal counties in southern Arizona. But last year, he moved to Prescott to take on Bennett, following an unsuccessful bid in 2022 to be the state’s chief elections official in 2022. Finchem lost the race to Democrat Adrian Fontes by 120,000 votes, and later unsuccessfully contested his loss in court.
Finchem has built his political brand on election denialism, spearheading a failed lawsuit against electronic tabulators with Republican Kari Lake. The courts have determined the case was frivolous and have sanctioned their attorneys
Bennett was first elected to the state Senate in 1999, and became Senate President in 2003. In 2009, he was appointed secretary of state when Jan Brewer was elevated to governor following Janet Napolitano’s resignation. In 2018, Bennett unsuccessfully challenged Doug Ducey in the GOP primary for governor.
But three years ago, Bennett returned to statewide politics and embraced election denialism, acting as the official liaison for the state Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election. He won election to the Senate in 2022, where he has returned to his roots as a lawmaker unafraid of bucking his party, even if it meant killing GOP-backed legislation in a chamber where Republicans held a single-vote majority — something that his opponents wielded against him.
Earlier this year, Bennett defected from his party to kill an anti-trans ballot referral that could have scrapped inclusive school policies across the state. Just a month later, he cast the deciding vote on another widely criticized referral that sought to preemptively bar cities from enacting taxes based on vehicle miles traveled.
And when Republicans united behind yet another ballot referral that would give local police the ability to jail migrants, Bennett predicated his support on revisions aimed at removing the threat to undocumented Arizonans already living in the state and adding caveats to when police officers may arrest people suspected of crossing the southern border illegally.
Also in the race was Steve Zipperman, who trailed Finchem and Bennett by a wide margin, with just 18% of votes in his favor as of Tuesday night. It isn’t the first time Zipperman has failed to earn the nomination: He also ran in 2022 and lost to Bennett. A U.S. Army veteran, Zipperman is also a real estate broker and lawyer. His focus, according to his campaign website, is on strong borders, parental rights in schools and preserving the second amendment right to bear arms.
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