MICHAEL BARONE: Jeff Flake is the senator from the wrong state.

In commenting on Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he was retiring rather than seeking a second term in the Senate, Ben Domenech of the Federalist wrote that Flake’s “brand changed dramatically.”

I take a different view: Flake, R-Ariz., in his 12 years in the House and five years in the Senate has taken consistent views. His strong free-market conservatism on economic issues led him to oppose former President George W. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug bill and TARP legislation, as well as the 2001-02 No Child Left Behind bill. He supported “comprehensive” immigration legislation in the House (for which John Boehner booted him from the Judiciary Committee) and in the Senate (as a member of the “Gang of Eight”).

Domenech’s point is that he bucked the Republican leadership in the House and not in the Senate, but in both cases he was acting in accordance with his own principles. Which are in line with the principles of those of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and the great bulk of its believers.

Flake is from a pioneer Mormon family: his great-grandfather William Jordan Flake, together with William Snow, founded the Mormon town of Snowflake, Arizona in 1878 (it’s up in the mountains and it does snow there). He graduated from Brigham Young University, an LDS school, and served as an LDS missionary in South Africa. His district residence is in Mesa, the huge (population over 450,000) suburban city east of Phoenix in the Valley of the Sun, which was founded by LDS pioneers at almost exactly the same time as Snowflake.

As voters, members of the LDS Church tend to be Republicans, free market on economics, conservative on such cultural issues as abortion, but also sympathetic to immigrants. These are all Jeff Flake’s positions.

He was clearly not the man for this moment.