Influential Republican defects to work Utah Democrat’s Senate campaign

Jim Bennett hadn’t meant to cross party lines when he went on Facebook a few days after his father, longtime Republican Sen. Robert F. Bennett, lost the GOP primary in May.

Jim Bennett, who had managed his father’s reelection campaign, clicked “Like” for the man his father would have run against in the general election — Democrat Sam Granato. An hour later, he got a call from Granato’s campaign manager. Would Bennett like to meet the candidate?

And so Jim Bennett, lifelong Republican and member of one of Utah’s most prominent GOP families, found himself working for the long-shot Democrat in this year’s Senate race.

“A friend said, ‘You’re throwing away your future in the Republican party,’ ” Bennett, 42, said recently. “But there isn’t a Republican Party. There’s the ‘tea party’ and the Democrats.”

In Utah, where Republicans have a 2-1 registration edge on Democrats, Jim Bennett is not alone in defecting from a GOP that has veered sharply to the right. Sheryl Allen, a veteran Republican state legislator, bolted to the Democrats to run for lieutenant governor. Tiani Coleman, former chairwoman of the Salt Lake County Republican Party, is running the campaign of a business professor — another former Republican — challenging the incumbent GOP congressman in this district.

Experts say that the switches may be noteworthy but that they won’t have much of an impact on the Utah races. “There’s a group of moderate Republicans that are disappointed in the direction the state party is taking, but the problem is they’re not as large and energized as the group that took out Sen. Bennett,” said Quin Monson, a political science professor at Brigham Young University.

A spokesman for the campaign of the Republican who beat Sen. Bennett, Mike Lee, noted that the senator himself had endorsed Lee, and that Bennett’s former campaign chair and other staffers are now working for Lee. “Jim’s an interesting guy, and he’s free to work for whoever pays him,” Boyd Matheson said.

Sen. Bennett said in an interview that he’d moved on since his loss and was not focused on the race. But he’s being a good Republican and hopes that victory by Lee, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., would help the GOP retake the Senate. There are no hard feelings toward his middle son.

“Jim Bennett has always been irrepressible and done things his own way,” the senator said. “We decided we can either clamp down on him and force him to conform, or let him go and see what happens.”

The third of six children, Jim Bennett grew up in Los Angeles, where his father held a variety of business positions. His grandfather had been a Utah senator, and when Robert Bennett won an open seat in 1992, Jim stayed behind to study theater at USC.

He stuffed envelopes for his father’s first campaign, but got fully launched in politics when he ran a theater in Utah. A board member asked Jim to write material for his long-shot gubernatorial candidacy.

Jim Bennett eventually became a campaign consultant, handling media and public communications for his father and other Utah Republicans. He even mounted his own run for the Legislature in 2006, narrowly losing in the most expensive race in state politics. He calls the race his proudest moment in politics.

“It’s a very hard thing to put your name up and … live with the rejection if you don’t get it,” he said.

Jim’s father, meanwhile, enjoyed sky-high approval ratings in 2006. He had forged a reputation as a strong conservative who was still willing to talk with Democrats. That latter characteristic proved his downfall. Conservative activists targeted him for backing the bank bailout in 2008 and cosponsoring a healthcare bill with a Democratic senator. The health bill never went anywhere, and Bennett voted against Obama’s health bill, but opponents contended that the collaboration with a Democrat showed Bennett was too willing to compromise. In May, Bennett became the first major victim of the national anti-incumbent fever.

The anti-Bennett forces were helped by Utah’s unusual primary system. The winner is determined by delegates voting at the state party’s convention, and anti-Bennett activists flooded the caucuses where the delegates were selected. Allen, the Republican legislator, recalled giving a speech praising Bennett’s record at her caucus. She was met with cold stares and not selected a delegate.

“You could feel the momentum turning against Bob Bennett for being a reasonable senator,” Allen said. “I was very alarmed by that.”

After his father’s defeat, Jim Bennett quickly became fond of Democrat Granato, who runs a food importing business and delis in Salt Lake City. In recent polls, he has trailed by nearly 30 points behind Lee, who wrote a legal memo supporting controversial state legislation enabling Utah to seize federal lands. “Unlike Mike Lee, Sam is nonideological,” Bennett said. “He’s far more in line with the mainstream Utah Republican voter than Mike Lee.”

Bennett designs media for Granato’s campaign and delights in loaning him several of his father’s sound bites, such as his riposte on how to deal with illegal immigration — “build a fence, but with a revolving door” — so businesses can still get a supply of workers.

Jim Bennett had asked the Granato campaign to keep his crossover quiet so as not to embarrass his father. But word leaked out, and Jim said he was surprised at how many Republican friends praised him. His brother has a “Republicans for Granato” sign on his lawn, and his sisters, who live in other states, are also supportive, he said. At a candidate’s forum here last week, a staffer in Sen. Bennett’s office approached Jim and said that her car was sporting a Granato bumper sticker.

Jim Bennett said many Republicans who back Granato want to stay quiet about it. “Very few of them were willing to jump off the cliff with me,” he said.

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com