Mysterious Green Party governor candidate has loads of GOP connections

Ahead of the July primary election, the Arizona governor’s race is packed. Eight candidates have made the ballot so far — though some may drop off due to petition signature challenges. 

One, however, is not like the others. Or, at least, she’s not like the party she supposedly represents. 

Green Party candidate Risa Lombardo appears to have no real affiliation with the party. She is a registered Green Party member — she has to be in order to run — though it’s not clear how recently she joined the party. (Phoenix New Times has requested but not yet received her registration information from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office.) Instead, Lombardo may be a “sham” or “stealth MAGA” candidate who is in fact a member of a local independent conservative group.

The Arizona Green Party first sounded the alarm about Lombardo and two other suspect Green Party candidates in December. “We do not know these candidates and they have never been involved in the AZGP,” the party wrote, adding that petition circulators were calling the candidates “independents.” The other two suspicious candidates were fellow gubernatorial candidate Lisa Castillo, who did not make the ballot, and Secretary of State candidate Duwayne Collier.

The Arizona Secretary of State website also lists William Pounds IV as a Green Party write-in candidate. Pounds is a known quantity in the Green Party, albeit not one with widespread backing.

Publicly available information about Lombardo is sparse. She’s 65 years old and a 35-year resident of Arizona who lives in north Phoenix, according to her nomination paperwork. But she has no campaign website and her campaign has generated no donations, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Arizona Secretary of State. Her candidate info on the Secretary of State website doesn’t include a photo of her — indeed, images of her are hard to find anywhere online — and the phone number attached to the campaign is a Google Voice number that’s now in someone else’s possession.

In part, her candidate statement on the Secretary of State’s website reads, “I am part of the Green party because my personal values resonate with its mission statement.” Gary Swing, a longtime Green Party member running as a write-in candidate for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, noted that the statement is “about as vague as it can be.” 

“It’s just a blanket silhouette of a person,” Swing told New Times.

Arizona Green Party Secretary John Ralston declined to issue an official statement on behalf of the party regarding Lombardo and the other stealth candidates until lawsuits challenging their petition signatures are decided.

The Arizona Green Party has a longstanding problem with candidates who don’t represent the party’s values “hijacking the Green Party’s ballot line for their own purposes,” Swing said. It’s done with the intent to “try to take votes away from the Democrats of those offices and help to elect Republicans by splitting the vote.”

This most recently occurred in Arizona’s 2024 Senate race. Two candidates, Mike Norton and Arturo Hernandez, filed enough signatures to appear on the Green Party primary ballot, but Green Party members hadn’t heard of either of them and accused outside interests of meddling in the party’s primary elections for political gain.

There are just more than 5,000 registered Green Party members in the state, according to the Arizona Secretary of State. But Green Party candidates can draw far more votes than that, albeit not enough to actually win many elections. Two years ago, Eduardo Quintana, the party’s ultimate candidate for the Senate, topped 75,000 votes. Sen. Ruben Gallego won that race by just more than 80,000 votes, and plenty of other recent contests have been much closer.

“What they’re doing may be legal, but I would argue that it’s unethical,” Swing said. “These candidates don’t represent what the Green Party represents. They’re trying to take over a ballot line of a political party they don’t represent.”

Republican ties

In an email to New Times, Lombardo wrote that she’s “very sincere about this effort,” despite not having put up a website or solicited donations. She added that she’s been both a registered Democrat and Republican in her life, and that “my ex-husband is a Republican, my kids are Democrats.” She said she supports “fair and transparent elections” and reform “on critical issues like education, homelessness, and the prison system.”

“I ultimately registered with the Green Party because its platform best reflects my principles,” she wrote. “I’m running for Governor to be a voice for everyone being ignored by the major parties, and to champion issues that matter to every Arizonan. I think a lot of voters would agree that, on the whole, neither party seems interested or capable of fixing the problems we face.”

However, the documentation available of Lombardo’s views suggests that she doesn’t quite fit the Green Party mold of an anti-war activist and environmentalist.

Business filings show Lombardo is the statutory agent for the National Freedom Coalition, an independent conservative group that describes itself as a community education group dedicated to principles of “continued free government.” Per a 2024 Arizona Sun Times article, the group was established after the 2022 election by conservative grassroots leader Michael Lombardo — his relation to Risa is unclear — and former state lawmaker Josh Barnett as a more right-wing, independent version of the Republican Legislative District 2 Committee after the 2022 election.

The LD 2 Republican Committee’s finance reports also show two cash payments to Lombardo in 2025 — totaling $404.33 — supposedly for postage. The committee has not responded to an inquiry from New Times about the payments.

Lombardo’s National Freedom Coalition group meets at an IHOP in north Phoenix. A video on the group’s Rumble account (named Affidavit Mommas 2.0) features a November meeting that included an appearance from GOP gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs — a potential election opponent for Lombardo, should she survive the Green Party primary. According to an Instagram post, Jay Feely, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, also spoke to the group in early April. It’s not clear if Lombardo was at those meetings.

Lombardo herself doesn’t appear to have made any political donations to federal campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission data. But fellow National Freedom Coalition leader Deborah Boehm has donated more than $600 to Republican political campaigns since 2020, including Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee and Barnett’s congressional run.

“The interests of Risa Lombardo seem to be aligned with what would be diametrically opposed to the values of the Green Party,” Swing said. “I do not see her as someone who represents the Green Party or its values, based on what little I know of her and her association with various conservative MAGA Republican interests.”

Lombardo’s GOP ties also extend to the group that helped her make the ballot. According to a Maricopa County lawsuit challenging the validity of Lombardo’s signatures, conservative circulator group Uncle Sam Petitions collected signatures on her behalf. Uncle Sam Petitions owner Bruce Gorshe has donated nearly $4,500 to Republican campaigns since 2019, including various Trump campaigns, according to FEC filings. 

Additionally, all of Uncle Sam’s petition circulators registered with the state for the 2026 election cycle — including Duwayne Collier, the supposed Green Party candidate for Secretary of State — are listed as paid circulators. Lombardo’s campaign finance reports show no expenses and no donations, raising the question of who paid circulators to collect her signatures.