Russ Jones wasn’t a high-profile member of the House of Representatives. In some circles, he was best known for flying his plane to and from his Yuma home during session.
But he was a key component in the Republican Party’s bid to create a “veto-proof” Legislature, as a victory in his race for southwest Arizona’s Senate seat would have moved Republicans one step closer to that goal.
In the end, the District 24 Republican and publicly funded candidate was narrowly defeated in the closest Senate race of the year, losing to his Democratic House seatmate Amanda Aguirre by fewer than 300 votes, after the carousel of early-ballot-counting had each candidate leading at one point during the process.
An Army veteran and an owner of several businesses in Yuma and San Luis, Mr. Jones was considered by many to be the Legislature’s foremost authority on immigration law and the impacts of policy changes on the state’s agriculture industry and rural areas.
Preparing to leave office after only one term, Mr. Jones spoke with Arizona Capitol Times Dec. 11 from his Yuma home to discuss the election, his future and where the Republican Party went wrong.
Your election was decided by only 273 votes, which is very close. How close did you expect your race to be when you started campaigning?
I didn’t expect it to be quite that close. Although I’m not a real experienced campaigner, at least campaigning on my own behalf, I’ve worked on other people’s campaigns in the past and learned from them that you always run every race as if it were a close race, whether it is or not.
People would ask me, “Where are you in the polls?” and I’d say, “I don’t have a clue — I don’t check polls and I don’t pay for polls. I’m just going to do everything I can do with the resources I have and run a positive campaign on the issues.” If you do that, and you wake up the day after the election and you’ve won, great. If you haven’t won, you can look back and say, at least I tried and I’ve done everything I possibly could have done to win the election. That’s how I feel.
So, no regrets about how your campaign went?
No. I think you can always look back and kind of Monday-morning-quarterback it, and say, “Well, gee, I guess I should have spent a little more money here than there.” But when you’re under the gun and in the midst of your campaign, you make the best decisions you can and then try to fine tune things after that. I think, all in all, we did pretty well.
We were certainly outspent and out-organized for this election. When I made the decision to run, I wasn’t aware that it was going to be such a targeted, highlighted campaign, that my opponent’s party was going to put the resources into getting her elected as they did. I was considerably outspent but, then again, that does happen in politics.
Ten days before the election, in terms of money I could receive in matching funds, I was maxed out. I couldn’t spend another dime if I had to. One of the problems we have with Clean Elections is you plan your campaign with the finances that Clean Elections says you’re going to get, and in the sequence and quantities you’re going to receive them. So, you plan your budget accordingly and you stay within your means.
With the ability of outside interest groups — in this case, the Democratic Party — to spend any amount of money they choose to spend over and beyond [Clean Elections funding], and even though it might trigger matching funds, there’s a limit of what you can get if you’re the target of theses [attacks], and once you’ve maxed that amount, they can continue to spend unlimited funds. Generally, it’s done very late in the campaign, and so you have little time to respond. There’s not a lot you can do.
It does create a situation that is very unbalanced. That’s not sour grapes, that’s the way the system is now. Hopefully, the Legislature will look at Clean Elections and realize that, as it is today — the intent was right and everyone had the best interest of the voters and the state in mind — but, unfortunately, it’s been abducted and what we have is not Clean Elections. This is a very good case in point and hopefully people will use my race as an example of what happens when people are willing to go beyond what is prescribed in Clean Elections.
There’s no penalty for [independent] spending — the state just has to match up to a certain point and after that, it’s like, “Oh, well, we’re sorry. You’re on your own.” That is not, I think, what the intent of the people was.
Do you think the Republican Party maybe let you down, in terms of either organization or funding?
Hindsight’s always 20/20. Reflecting on it, [the Democratic Party] chose to put considerable resources into the election and the Republicans, on the other hand, were a little bit more complacent. I think their feelings were that I was going to win and that [House Republican candidate Ken] Rosevear was going to win and that [House Democrat candidate Lynne] Pancrazi was going to win. I think people were making assumptions and became a little complacent. I didn’t, because, of course, when you’re in the trenches, you see and hear what’s going on.
If I decide to run again in two years or two years after that, I’ll be a little bit wiser and better prepared for this type of election, unless the status quo is changed.
I hope it is — I don’t think my race was the only race where some of these types of shenanigans took place, where exorbitant amounts of money were put into place. I don’t think that was the intent of Clean Elections and it gives very small, well-organized, well-funded groups more power and influence than any single lobbyist ever had.
You mentioned earlier that you didn’t know coming into this election that it would be as personal and you’ve been critical of the negative campaign tactics used in your district. Is that just a fact of life now in politics?
I hope not. Some might say that the genie might be let out of the bottle or Pandora’s Box is open and you’re not going to get it closed again. I would hope that is not the case. This did get very personal.
Instead of collecting my $5 contributions, I spent the first three to four weeks of my campaign defending myself in court, at my own considerable cost. Even during the election, I spent valuable time defending myself successfully against Clean Election challenges. It takes time, it takes energy, and it distracts you from your campaign.
I really had two campaigns to fight, one of which I used Clean Elections money to the limit I was permitted to by law, and the other I had to use my own resources, which I was certainly willing to do. I’m more happy that that part of the campaign was successful than the other, because my reputation and my good name is far more important to me than any one election.
You are heavily involved in immigration issues in the Yuma area — what is the state’s responsibility in that field?
I think that the legislation that I worked on last session, which was a limited and appropriate response on the part of the state with regard to employer sanctions — all of my bills got merged with Russell Pearce’s bill, then Russell Pearce’s bill got changed quite a bit — was good, with the exception of the felony trespass component, which I disagreed with because you can’t just put something in play without looking at the probable results and impacts on local law enforcement.
That’s just like the issue that’s coming out of the courts now — the fact that someone paid a coyote so much money to get into the country doesn’t necessarily make him complicit in the process of being a smuggler.
Some form of employer sanction, going after the unlawful employment, is certainly something that the state should look at. I’m talking about people who pay cash, who don’t pay any benefits, who don’t pay Social Security, workers comp, unemployment, and make no attempt to comply with our laws in Arizona on employment. I think instead of just going after every employer and making them the bad guy — which they’re not, because we depend on them for our economy, for crying in a bucket — we should go after the bad players first and make an example of them.
The final area is to hold harmless our border communities from the impacts on their education, health care and law enforcement. You know, we take the homeland security money, unfortunately, and politicize it and spread it all over the state and don’t focus the money and use it where we have the biggest threat and the current largest impact, and that’s in the border regions. And I’m not saying that because I’m from this district, but because we’re in the front lines in the trenches with this issue, but we don’t get the resources that we need to keep our citizens safe. Our tax bases aren’t sufficient to sustain this long term and protect our citizens.
I think that the protection of the state is a statewide responsibility, so there shouldn’t be an inordinate burden on certain regions, just because of where they are geographically.
You mentioned the portion of the immigration bill that you were opposed to, which was the trespassing component. That’s an issue that was controversial and drew a lot of attention. Do you think the attitudes of some of the more zealous members of the Republican Party on immigration, especially regarding felony trespassing and deportations, ultimately hurts immigration reform and the public perception of the Republican platform on immigration?
Yes. I think it does at both a state and national level. It didn’t help J.D. [Hayworth], and if you look at the state level, I think, although some of those zealots are in districts that are ‘safe’ and they’re able to continue their zealotry, a critical part of future elections is the independent voters.
This is just an opinion, but I think they tend to be more conservative folks as a rule, but they are not your ultra-conservatives. So, when the party gets hijacked and the majority caucus gets hijacked by a few members and is taken off the edge of the cliff, pulling the rest of us along with it, we see that reflected in the general vote and attitude from those same independents.
We may pick up our Republican base, but in Arizona now, you can’t run an election without paying attention to the independent voter.
You feel that was part of what happened in the election, big-picture wise?
I think so. I think there was a frustration that things weren’t getting done. We never did get a significant immigration law passed because what we presented to the governor was too easy to veto. They had enough of the extreme measures in them to allow the governor to safely veto those and make the Republican caucus the bad guys.
I think that was, strategically, a poor move on our part, because I think the people of Arizona truly wanted something done with immigration reform in the state. The reason we didn’t get enough done is we couldn’t build a consensus across the board, and you see that at the federal level, where they haven’t been able to do that, either.
When you look back at your two years in the House, what do you see as your biggest success during your time at the Legislature?
I ran a number of bills that helped my constituents in various ways in La Paz and Yuma counties, so I felt I took care of business with respect to my district.
But I think that the most effective thing that I did, and other like-minded people from rural parts of the state, was working together to offer reasonable alternatives so that a one-size-fits-all immigration solution wasn’t what went forward, that there were sufficient exceptions that they could get done what they needed to affect the urban center of the state without negatively impacting the outlying areas.
Was there anything you wanted to get done, but didn’t get a chance to?
How do we deliver opportunity to higher education equally throughout the state? I believe the 2+2 program, and how it’s evolved in the Yuma area, is a model that needs to be duplicated.
That’s something that I think is very important to our state, especially the rural parts of the state, where people pay the same taxes as people in Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff but don’t have the convenience of having proximity to a university, can have equal access to the opportunity. I think that’s a failure of our system. As a result, we export our finest into those university systems and we don’t get all of them back.
I think we should build on that model, but we need to dedicate the resources, but we need to have an organization to see it through. But because we eliminated the Community Colleges Board at the state level, we don’t have that. We have a bunch of independent fiefdoms all fighting for the same dollar.
Would that 2+2 architecture be better than allowing community colleges to offer four-year baccalaureate degrees?
Absolutely. Only about 15 percent of the resources to run our community colleges comes from our state coffers. Then you have to look at what is your property tax base. Frankly, in the rural parts of the state, we don’t have that.
That suggestion of creating a bunch of very poor, independent liberal arts colleges wasn’t even a Band-Aid, in my opinion.
What will you miss the most about the House?
I’m going to miss the people, absolutely. They’re a great bunch of folks — Democrat and Republican, and the staff.
And it’s certainly not dull, never for a minute. It’s very exciting, and I’m going to miss that.
Thank you for your time.
Up Closer
Worst job you ever had?
Building fiberglass munitions drop boxes for the military with temperatures ranging from 100- to 140 degrees in the boxes.
Last movie you saw?
“The DaVinci Code.” It’s not the book, but it was enjoyable and it made me want to read the book again.
Least favorite food?
I really don’t have one.
Favorite food?
Mexican food. After all, I was raised on the border.
Best book you ever read?
“Winds of War” by Herman Wouk, and the sequel is “War and Remembrance,” which is a very good book, too.
Any time.