Arizona Green Party Candidate Draws Party Pushback Over Republican Ties

This article was originally published by the Arizona Mirror on April 15, 2026. It is republished here under a CC BY‑NC‑ND 4.0 license. Any views expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Political Report or the Outsider Media Foundation. Source links. Title amended for style and image provided by Independent Political Report.

Risa Lombardo was a Republican precinct committeeman until days before she filed a statement of interest to run for Arizona governor as a Green Party candidate in 2026.

In 2023, Lombardo was hawking “Kari Won” buttons and supporting far-right Republican campaigns, alongside her husband Michael Lombardo, who remains a Republican precinct committeeman for Legislative District 2.

The Arizona Green Party says Risa Lombardo’s candidacy is a sham.

In an email to the Arizona Mirror, Lombardo claimed that her candidacy is genuine and that, while Mike Lombardo, who she said was her ex-husband, is a Republican, she was a Democrat for most of her life.

Maricopa County voter registration records show that Risa Lombardo was a registered Democrat from 2006 through 2016 and voted in the Republican primaries in 2022 and 2024 before registering with the Green Party in 2025.

The Green Party is no stranger to Republicans co-opting its name to run candidates aimed at siphoning votes away from Democrats in tight races. The tactic doesn’t always work, but in 2008, Democratic state Rep. Jackie Thrasher said she believed a Green Party candidate who received donations from her Republican opponents cost led to her losing a reelection bid.

And in 2010 a former Republican legislator recruited unhoused people and street performers to run as Green Party candidates, admitting that those candidates might take votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrats.

As of January, about 36% of Arizona’s voters were registered as Republicans, 28% were registered Democrats and 34% were unaffiliated. Democrats need those unaffiliated voters to win, and any third party candidate who takes votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrats could make or break a campaign.

Lombardo was elected as a Republican Precinct Committeeman for Legislative District 2 in July 2024, alongside Mike Lombardo, according to records from Maricopa County. She served as a precinct committeeman, a position that is typically held by people who are highly involved in partisan politics, from October 2024 until at least Feb. 28, 2025.

She filed a statement of interest to run for governor as a Green Party candidate on March 5, 2025. In Maricopa County’s next monthly report, on March 31, 2025, Risa Lombardo was no longer listed as a Republican precinct committeeman.

When they filed to run for precinct committeeman in March 2024, both Lombardos listed the same residential address, in the same lot of a north Phoenix mobile home park.

The Mirror could not find any records in Maricopa County showing that the couple had divorced, and Risa Lombardo did not respond to follow-up questions on her sudden switch from Republican to Green Party, or details about where and when her divorce took place.

In her candidate financial disclosure form, filed Feb. 26, Risa Lombardo checked “n/a” in response to a question about whether her spouse is a member of her household, indicating that she was either unmarried or widowed.

The Arizona Green Party declined to comment, but has made social media posts warning voters that it views Lombardo as an illegitimate Green Party candidate. As of December 2025, the party posted that it had no affiliation with and had never even heard of Lombardo, gubernatorial candidate Lisa Castillo or secretary of state hopeful Duwayne Collier, who are all running in 2026 under the Green Party name.

“Thank you for challenging Risa Lombardo’s signatures,” the Arizona Green Party wrote in a post on X in response to independent candidate for governor Teri Ann Hourihan’s legal challenge to Lombardo’s candidacy. “She’s a Republican trying to hijack our ballot line. She’s a sham candidate.”

Beyond serving as a precinct committeeman, campaign finance reports show that the Legislative District 2 Republican Committee paid Lombardo $404 in 2025 for postage to send certified letters to precinct committeemen.

Michael Lombardo is a member of the Maricopa County Republican Committee’s “Ultra Grassroots” team, whose website describes him as “a dedicated Republican activist focused on grassroots organizing, election integrity, and party engagement.”

Michael Lombardo got into politics during the sham “audit” of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County. Feeling that his vote was undermined, he volunteered for double shifts during the audit, according to his biography.

“Since 2023, he has assisted in running local, county, state, and national delegate elections for the Republican Party,” the online biography says.

Together, Michael and Risa Lombardo supported the 2024 campaign of far-right Republican Josh Barnett, an avid conspiracy theorist and election denier who has unsuccessfully run for office in Arizona three times since 2020.

Barnett, a QAnon follower, lost bids for Congress in 2020 and 2022. The Lombardos both donated to his failed campaign for Arizona Senate in 2024, and Barnett thanked both of them for their help in a Facebook post.

Lombardo told the Mirror on Tuesday that her candidacy was sincere and that she switched to the Green Party because its platform best reflects her principles.

On its website, the Arizona Green Party says it supports phasing out the use of fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy, a transition to an eco-socialist economy, eliminating poverty, ending police brutality and mass incarceration, shrinking the military-industrial complex and promoting free and fair elections.

Many of those goals are a far cry from the ones Barnett set out in his campaign, and that Risa Lombardo supported two years ago. While Barnett’s campaign was based on election integrity, he promoted a plan to automatically dedicate Arizona’s electoral college votes to Trump in 2024, regardless of the election results, a notion that even some of his allies found to be antithetical to election integrity.

Barnett isn’t the only far-right candidate that Risa Lombardo has supported. In 2023, she registered the business T3 Designs at the same home address listed in her campaign finance reports and candidate paperwork.

In the business’s Instagram posts that year, Lombardo featured photos of buttons for sale that read “Trump Won” and “Kari Won” referring to Trump’s presidential campaign loss in 2020 and his ally Kari Lake’s loss in the Arizona governor’s race in 2022.

Lombardo also sold merchandise promoting far-right Republican Anthony Kern’s 2024 bid for Congress and a shirt bearing the GOP elephant with the letters “FJB” underneath, short for “F*** Joe Biden.”

Neither Trump nor Lake are fans of clean energy, with Trump working to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and to open up protected lands to mining and drilling.

Both Lake and Trump have used the refrain “drill, baby, drill” to describe their enthusiasm for fossil fuels.

Lombardo said that during her run for governor she’ll be focused on equal opportunity for everyone based on merit, fair and transparent elections that reflect the will of the voters, a responsible environmental plan to protect Arizona’s air and water, and meaningful changes to the way the state handles education, homelessness and the prison system.

“You can find those in our Green Party Platform and you’ll hear a lot about them from me on the campaign trail,” she said.

Lombardo is one of many candidates facing a challenge from Democratic activist Craig Beckman, who says she didn’t collect enough valid voter signatures to make it on the ballot.

In Hourihan’s challenge to Lombardo’s candidacy, which was dismissed April 13, Lombardo was represented in court by Republican election attorneys Tim La Sota and Kory Langhofer.

Beckman claims that Lombardo failed to obtain the 1,771 signatures needed to make it onto the ballot as a Green Party candidate because many of the 3,250 signatures she submitted were invalid.

Beckman said that several of the people who gathered signatures on Lombardo’s behalf listed residential addresses where they didn’t actually live. He claimed he confirmed this by sending private investigators to the addresses listed on the petition sheets to speak with the people who actually live there. Some of the residents said they didn’t know the petition circulators, and one of the homes appeared to be abandoned.

He also claimed that multiple signature gatherers for Lombardo were not eligible for the job because they had felony convictions on their record, making them ineligible to register to vote in Arizona if they haven’t petitioned to have their rights restored.

Because signature gatherers are required to list their residential addresses and be eligible to register to vote in Arizona, Beckman argued that all of the signatures gathered by those who listed incorrect addresses and who have felony convictions should be thrown out.