Aaron Lieberman pitches pragmatism in bid to unseat Carine Werner in pivotal Senate race

Democratic lawmaker Aaron Lieberman hopes to unseat Republican Sen. Carine Werner in one of the Arizona Legislature’s most competitive races in November, with a focus on pragmatism instead of partisan fighting. 

Lieberman told the Arizona Mirror that his door-knocking efforts have mostly focused on reaching independents and moderate Republican voters. Legislative District 4 covers parts of northeast Phoenix, Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. It’s highly competitive, but leans Republican. 

“The biggest thing I hear again and again and again is they’re sick of all the fighting,” he said. “They’re sick of all the name calling.”

During his prior stint as a state representative from 2018 until 2021, Lieberman said that he didn’t always agree with then-Gov. Doug Ducey or Rusty Bowers, who was the GOP speaker of the House of Representatives, but he still worked with them. 

“I never called them any names,” Lieberman said. “I never cursed (them) out.”

Relations between lawmakers from both parties at the Arizona Capitol have become increasingly hostile — a hallmark of Trump-era politics, which has emphasized name-calling and outrageous claims about political opponents. The Republicans who control both chambers have refused to consider the vast majority of Democrat-sponsored proposals, and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed hundreds of bills that had only Republican support. 

Lieberman also pointed to a hot mic incident last year during a Scottsdale Unified School District meeting, where Werner is a school board member, when she made derogatory comments about a district employee’s appearance, calling her “morbidly obese.” Following her comments, more than 1,500 people signed a petition calling for her resignation. 

Werner did not respond to requests for an interview.

In 2025, Werner sponsored legislation to make school board elections partisan, and though the measure passed with support from Republicans and one Democrat, it earned a veto from Hobbs. Werner was elected to the school board in 2022 and is not seeking reelection this year. 

“For normal people, that’s just crazy behavior, you know what I mean?” Lieberman said. “The notion that you’d think the problem in our schools is we don’t have enough partisanship doesn’t make any sense to regular people. And they kind of can’t believe that that’s the track record of the person representing them down at the state Senate.”

But Werner has also had success in working with Hobbs and legislative Democrats since she ousted incumbent Sen. Christine Marsh, a Democrat, from her seat in 2024.

As the chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, she sponsored 21 pieces of legislation that gained bipartisan support and that Hobbs signed into law. The majority of that legislation was focused on preventing Medicaid fraud, protecting healthcare workers and changing policies at the Department of Child Safety. 

Several of those bills were aimed at improving communications among DCS, Native American tribes and law enforcement agencies to prevent tragedies like the 2025 murder of Emily Pike, a 14-year-old member of the San Carlos Apache tribe who was killed after running away from a DCS-licensed group home.

“I believe reforms must focus on one simple principle: the right information must reach the right people at the right time,” Werner wrote in a Feb. 15 social media post about the bills. “When agencies communicate clearly and act swiftly, children are protected. When they don’t, the consequences are heartbreaking.”

But Lieberman said that Werner is too extreme for LD4. In 2024, alongside members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, she advocated for putting PragerU lessons in Arizona’s public schools. The far-right nonprofit media company offers videos with titles like “Your Pilot Is a DEI Hire. Good Luck!” and “M.I.A. Masculinity in America.”

“I think it’s critical in the few competitive districts that we have, that you actually get pragmatic people who are working from the center, and that’s me in my background — and, frankly, that’s not Senator Warner, who’s much more on the extreme side,” Lieberman said. 

During his time in the House, Lieberman said some of his accomplishments working with Republicans were grants to small businesses to help owners get by during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, tax credits to bring the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to Arizona and bringing more affordable four-year degrees to community colleges. 

“Every single one of those issues was identified as having strong support among Democrats and Republicans who were really working from the center, and that’s what I think we need more of,” he said. 

Lieberman left the Arizona House in 2021 to mount an unsuccessful run for governor, a race that Hobbs ultimately won. 

But he’s feeling good about his chances this year, with Democrats hopeful that they’ll finally gain control of one or both chambers of the legislature for the first time since 1966. 

The LD4 Senate race is one of 17 that the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is putting money into in hopes of flipping the seats. 

If elected, Lieberman said he wants to help tackle some of the affordability issues that Republicans ran on in 2024, but have only gotten worse since then. 

Lieberman said he supports a temporary pause on the state gas tax to give drivers some relief, wants the state to look closely at supermarket mergers that drive up costs, and is a proponent of allowing cities and towns to regulate businesses like Airbnb, which take up housing stock and drive up costs for homeowners. 

“It just gets back to having folks down there who will work together for the good of the state, and that means by definition, compromise,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”