In this interview, Mo Denis expresses his view that public service is a form of service for the Lord. He also explains how church youth programs and church service have impacted his approach to his role as an elected official. This interview was conducted on May 17, 2021, by Kellen Everett, a BYU student majoring in political science.

Kellen Everett: So, Senator Denis, for a little bit of context, can you tell us about your background?

Mo Denis: Sure. I’m the son of Cuban immigrants, and my sister was born in Cuba, and then my parents left Cuba in the late fifties. And they went to New York. And I was born in Brooklyn, New York. The second of four kids. Well, as an immigrant family we moved around a lot. I think we lived in New York for two years, then to Miami, and then we moved to Las Vegas and back to Miami, then to Arlington, Virginia, back to Miami, and then to Las Vegas. So all of that happened just in my first six years. And then when we moved to Las Vegas, I was six. When I was seven, so the year after we moved to Las Vegas, missionaries came and taught my family. And my mom and dad and sister were baptized and then I was baptized a year later. We were baptized in a Spanish branch in Las Vegas. There was only one at the time—a little teeny Spanish branch. It only had about thirty members or so. My parents desired to be closer to Zion, [laughs] so they picked us up and we moved again to Salt Lake City for two years. And then we moved back to Las Vegas. So the rest of the time I’ve been here.

In fact, where I live now is just less than a mile from where I grew up and where I’ve raised my family. I went to Rancho High School in Las Vegas, in that part of town. My parents, after being in the Spanish branch, moved to an English ward. So the rest of probably my youth and late childhood was in an English ward. When I got married, we moved back when we got done with BYU, we moved back and live close to our parents. So actually the house we bought is in between my parents and my wife’s parents within just a few blocks of both of those. So we pretty much have been in the same place for a long time.

Kellen Everett: And when did you first become interested in politics?

Mo Denis: So when I was a senior at Rancho High School, I had a government teacher that would challenge you. And he taught us about the political system and government. And he really kind of made it so that you wanted to be a part of, or at least understand, what was going on politically and in government. And so I think that’s probably where maybe an inkling of wanting to run for office someday was there, because he made it sound like everybody should run for office at some point. You know, if you want to have opinions, then you need to be willing to do things. Be willing to either speak out or run for office or do something. And even though I wasn’t in student government in high school at all, but just somewhere in the back of my mind, I just kind of put it there and said, “Maybe someday I’ll run.” And so that’s probably where it really started.

Kellen Everett: What government or political positions have you served in, and when did you serve in each of them?

Mo Denis: When we moved back from BYU, I started working. I’d always been really involved. And the church is really good about teaching us to serve others, and the Boy Scouts was good about teaching us to serve, and so I continued to be involved in the community. And after a few years, I was asked to serve on the Las Vegas–Clark County Library Board, which had at the time like fourteen or so libraries. But it was a period of time when they had just passed the bond issue and ended up building another ten or eleven libraries.

I’d always used the libraries growing up. It was a good place, especially for a Latino kid, that doesn’t always get the opportunity to go places. It was a place to go to do that and to be able to be anywhere and do anything. And somewhere along the way, I learned what a library trustee did. And so when I was asked by the city council to serve on the library board, I did. I did that for about eight years. Kind of almost simultaneous to that, my daughter was starting kindergarten, and I went to the school, and they were talking about parents getting involved in making education better. So I volunteered to become part of the PTA. I was doing the library board and PTA. Ultimately, I ended up being elected president of the Nevada Parent Teacher Association later on, after I had served locally. But that was kind of my first appointed position. Subsequently I was also appointed to serve on a city commission for community development block grants.

And so between the PTA, the community block grants, and the library board, I became involved with the legislature because they controlled what were the laws for education, for libraries, or for our communities. I live in an older part of Las Vegas and so have gotten involved in trying to make the community better. So my first elected position was to the Nevada Assembly; which, after being on a library board for about eight years, I ran for the assembly. I lost my first race by sixty-two votes and decided I had done my part. I had tried. Didn’t succeed. So I was entitled to complain or do whatever I wanted about politics, because I had done my part.

But about six months after I lost the assembly race, I was called to be a bishop. And so I thought that’s what was meant to be. So I was serving as bishop when the next cycle came around two years later, and it became a true open seat for the assembly. But because I had been called the bishop, I wasn’t sure if I’d want to do it or not. I started making some phone calls to other folks that I trusted, including one that had served for many years in the legislature and had been a bishop and a stake president. He encouraged me to go ahead and run—that I should be able to work it out. So I ended up running and won. Actually, because it was an open seat and I had already run and people knew me, I ended up winning in a landslide. So my first elected office was in the assembly.

Kellen Everett: And have you served in elected positions other than the assembly? You’re currently a senator, correct?

Mo Denis: Yeah, so after serving for six years in the assembly (actually, I was a bishop for four of those years and then my last two I had been released and was serving on the high council), term limits had kicked in. My senator was turning out, so I had an open seat that I could run for, and I decided to run for the Senate. I was elected to the Senate, which is interesting only because right when I had decided to run for the Senate and right when I was getting ready to file for office to run, Elder [Jeffrey R.] Holland was in our stake, and he reorganized the stake, and I was called into a stake presidency. So I thought, “Well, maybe I need to drop out of the race.” But I asked him about it when he called me, I said, “Well, you know, I’m running for Senate, so I dropped out,” and he said, “No!” He said, “We need good people to run, so you should stay in.” So I did. And a month later when filing closed I ended up winning the Senate seat unopposed, which is kind of unheard of, because with an open seat usually you get a lot of people that want to run. And in this particular case, I ended up being the only person in all of the legislature running for office that was unopposed that year, which made it easier because I was trying to get my feet set in the new stake presidency. So anyway, I was elected to the Senate, and I served in the Senate since then, so I am in my last term now. Our term limits are twelve years. I’ve been in for about eleven years or so in the Senate.

Kellen Everett: So you’ve mentioned various leadership positions that you’ve held in the church as well. How do you balance holding church callings while being in office?

Mo Denis: So obviously you have to make priorities and decide what you’re going to do. When I was serving as a bishop and in the assembly, I ended up having to delegate what was going on, which was interesting because really a lot of people want the bishop to do everything. But I wasn’t there because we meet in session for four months every other year. So for four months, I have to go live in Carson City during the week, but I can come home on the weekends. And so the hardest part is during the session, during those four months, and I just ended up delegating. You know, having Relief Society presidents, elders quorum presidents, do what, technically, we do now. And the way we run it now is the way that we were doing it back then. It was making sure that everybody was doing their part; it wasn’t just the bishop doing everything.

And then you have to balance work and family. And one of the things that I’d been taught along the way was that sometimes you might have a lot of church things you got to do, so you have to cut back on everything else. Or you might have a lot of legislative things to do, and I just have to cut back. It’s like right now. I was released a year ago as a counselor, I was called into a second stake presidency, served for another year, and I was called into a mission presidency. So now I’m serving in a mission presidency, and I’m in the middle of the legislative session. And fortunately, because of the pandemic and using Zoom and other things, I’ve been able to take care of a lot of my duties doing that. So it’s a mixture of priorities, a mixture of using technology to be able to take care of some things, and then making sure that everybody understands what I need to do and how we can work around those issues. But interestingly, in my seventeen years at the legislature I’ve been able to be home on the weekends during session, except for the very last weekend. So it’s not like I was gone for four months completely, but I was able to be there and take care of things on the weekends and then be able to get back to the legislature and finish. So it’s just kind of been a combination, but probably the most important thing is having a very supportive wife who has always supported me in things that I’ve done whether it’s church, or legislative, or family, or work, or whatever. So having that is critical to be able to balance everything.

Kellen Everett: So you touched on this already very briefly, but how does your religion affect your approach to your office?

Mo Denis: So for me the gospel is the way I live my life, and so all the things that I do are centered around that. The church has taught me to serve. I’ve served in various church callings throughout my life, including as a youth. So between youth activities and service there, and also Boy Scouting—it’s all been kind of intertwined for me. I mean, the things that you learn as a Scout—to be honest, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, you know, those are all things that I use each and every day in my life. I use them in politics; I use them in the church. The gospel teaches us to serve others and to be patient, to be loving towards others—all of those things have been really helpful. And especially in a political environment, where there’s some challenging issues that come up and people can get angry with one another and those kinds of things. So having the gospel has really helped me to be able to find a balance there. I served as the majority leader of the Senate for a time, and one of the things that people said was that I was an even-keeled type person, and then it also helped me to look to try to understand where people were on both sides of the aisle. I mean just to look at an issue from both sides, and the gospel has really taught me to be able to do that. And so you know that when things get really tough, being grounded in the gospel made it real easy to make decisions when it came to certain things. So that’s been very helpful.

Kellen Everett: Did your religious beliefs affect the party you chose to affiliate with?

Mo Denis: I’ve been a Democrat my whole life; my parents were Democrats. I looked to see what was important to me. Parties have certain beliefs, but at the end of the day, each party has something that I like. But really for me, the priority was if I’m going to work on education issues, who’s working on those kinds of things the way that I want to work on them? Immigration, you know, who’s doing the things that I want to do? So for me in looking at party, it was like, where do I feel the most comfortable? Where do people think similar to the way I do on the things that are important to me? I figured out that there wasn’t going to be a party that had every perfect thing that I would want in a party; and so the important things for me, that’s what I look for. So that’s kind of what guided me. You may think, at some point well maybe I need to switch parties because of this or that or whatever, but when you look at the issues and what’s important, at the end of the day that’s why I am a Democrat.

And the other thing is, I also feel because there’s like no perfect party; we need good members of the church to be involved in all aspects of politics, in all parties. Because if we tend to only do one thing, then our voices don’t always get heard and people don’t get to know us, right? They get to think of a member of the church as being this kind of person, but when they meet someone like me, for example, they see something different. I think that’s important.

Kellen Everett: Has your approach to interactions with constituents and other public officials been shaped by your religion?

Mo Denis: Yes, I felt that the church has always taught us to serve other people. And I mean, even as a missionary we talked to people all the time, right? We even knocked on doors and things like that. So even just those technical aspects of running for office are not unlike some of the things that we do in the church—whether it’s knocking on doors as a missionary and talking to people, speaking in front of large groups. Leading and being in leadership positions. You know, setting examples. So I view it as intertwined. As I look back now on my life, I see where my public service has just come out of my church service. I view it as my opportunity to serve other people like the church has taught us. Even though there’s some days I don’t necessarily like being in politics, and other days I love it because I’m able to help people. But when I’m knocking doors talking to people—that’s my favorite part of running for office: being able to talk to people and really sit down and talk about issues. So that definitely has been very helpful.

Kellen Everett: Do you believe that incivility in politics and partisan polarization are problems today?

Mo Denis: Yeah, I’m getting more worried because the things that we’ve been taught at church—that you should love your neighbor, you should forgive others, those kinds of things—are getting lost in politics now that people have become too polarized. The folks on the right and the folks on the left seem to be very polarized, but the majority of people are still in the middle. But because of the way the political situation is, those things influence what happens to the folks in the middle. And so I worry about that. To find solutions, we have to be able to talk and we have to be able to see each other’s point of view. I look at the Savior when he was on the earth; he talked to everybody, right? He spent most of his time working with the poor and the sick but still he would talk to anybody and everybody. And so I looked at that example when I look at the kinds of things that we need to be doing to work together.

I consider myself a moderate. I’ve done very well to work across the aisle. I do well to work with folks on the left. I also work and talk with folks on the right. And that’s only because I’m willing to listen. And I think some people have stopped listening. President [Russell M.] Nelson has taught us to learn to listen, right? To hear Him. And I think we need to do the same things with our neighbors; we need to hear them. And what’s happening in politics is, I think, not good for the country.

Kellen Everett: What lessons have you learned about politics that you’d like to share with young Latter-day Saints considering involvement in politics or a career in government?

Mo Denis: I think that one thing Elder [Jeffrey R.] Holland had told me is that we need good people everywhere. We need to be involved. We need to be involved in our communities, and we need to do so with love and kindness, even if people don’t want to do the things that we want to do. But if we would do that, I think people see our example and they see the kinds of things that we’re trying to do, and if they can feel the love that we have for them—I think all those things are so important. And if all we ever do is just do our church things and never get involved in the community, then people think that all we care about is just us. But by serving in government, serving in elected positions, people see that we truly want to be involved. And as I mentioned earlier, we need folks in all aspects, and all parties, and everything, so it’s not just one thing that we do and everybody says, “Oh yeah, they just do that.” Because people they interpret things differently even in the church, right?

And so when we get involved, people see that we care. And so that’s really important in the political process that we be involved in those aspects, even though I know we’ve got busy things. We’ve got families; we’ve got all those things. But it’s a sacrifice that I think the Lord needs us to make, and not everybody’s going to be able to do that. But the ones that can’t run for office, they should definitely be involved in getting to know candidates and talking to their legislators and those kinds of things. Getting involved in community projects. Maybe they can’t run for public office, but they can do like a PTA or get involved in local nonprofits. I mean, there’s some nonprofits that do some amazing things in our communities, and we can be involved in those.

At the end of the day, I feel like something I’ve done has helped someone—whether it’s helped the church or an individual. That, hopefully, something that I’ve done will have made a difference in somebody’s life, and I’m just grateful for the opportunity to serve in whatever capacity that the Lord needs me to serve. And if that’s community service or if it’s church service or whatever it is, I’m just grateful that I’ve been given that opportunity to do that.