For years, Arizona’s Green Party has tried — unsuccessfully — to stop sham candidates from exploiting its ballot line.
Yet again, a little-known candidate with deep Republican ties is trying to take over the Green Party’s nomination for governor.
“It's certainly legal, but it’s slimy — until you start to think through the whole process, and you realize that the game is already being played, and you can't stop it,” former Green Party candidate Mike Norton told us.
“Now, we’re watching it all happen again.”
Norton knows a thing or two about sham Green candidates. In 2024, he was one of them.
Unknown GOP-affiliated operatives are often accused of recruiting little-known candidates to run under the Green Party banner, using the progressive third party as a pawn to boost their own chances. The process unfolds through a tangled web of backdoor deals, but Norton is unusually open about it.
He became a U.S. Senate candidate at the behest of clandestine Republican Party officials, he says, despite having no allegiance to the Green Party’s platform and having little political experience beyond Scottsdale civic affairs.
“I predicted at the end of that election, the Green Party was going to be a trampoline for a clown show for years,” Norton said. “And here we are again.”
The latest addition to said clown show, this time for Arizona’s midterm elections, is Green Party gubernatorial hopeful Risa Lombardo. The Phoenix New Times and Arizona Mirror have dug up her GOP roots: selling Trump merch, serving as a Republican precinct committeewoman and hiring a conservative firm to collect the signatures she needed to make the ballot.
Then, when her candidacy was challenged, two lawyers well known for representing conservative causes — Kory Langhofer and Tim La Sota — helped preserve her spot in the race.
Green Party officials accused major-party operatives of a similar ploy in Norton’s 2024 race. But as pseudo-Green candidates, Norton and Arturo Hernandez lost the primary to the real Green Party-backed candidate, Eduardo Quintana.
It was a lot of work — legal fees, signature gathering and behind-the-scenes coordination — for campaigns that weren’t intended to win.
But Norton said it’s a worthwhile expense.
“If you get a Green Party candidate on the ballot and they stick, that’s more than enough to swing the election,” he said. “(Lombardo) could tip the gubernatorial election, and we end up with (Andy) Biggs. We'll see.”
And this time, Norton suggested, the Green Party ploy could be more effective without Kari Lake on the ballot.
The Kari Lake effect
Norton built his career lobbying for trade groups in the explosives and munitions industry. That made his 2024 run for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat as a Green Party candidate particularly suspicious, given the party’s staunch anti-war platform and support for steep cuts to military spending.
Norton admitted he wasn’t a real Green Party contender a few weeks before the primary election. Party officials and reporters suspected as much — his campaign finance reports were loaded with donations from Democratic-aligned groups and donors.
But it wasn’t Democrats who first recruited Norton, he said. It was Republicans who didn’t want Lake to win the U.S. Senate seat.
During the 2024 Senate race, it was an open secret that some Republicans weren’t happy with their party's Arizona Senate nominee. A leaked tape revealed former Arizona GOP Chair Jeff DeWit tried to organize a bribe for Lake so she would stay out of the race, and national Republicans questioned whether her campaign was worth investing in.
Behind the scenes, the Washington Post reported, even Donald Trump was worried.
The Lake-adverse Republicans, Norton said, told him Democrats would eventually ask him to run as a sham Green Party candidate to knock Hernandez — one of the other allegedly sham Green candidates backed by Lake allies — off the ballot. Democrats did, indeed, approach him.
The idea was simple: beat Hernandez, then drop out, leaving no Green Party candidate on the ballot.
“They didn't want Kari Lake to run, and they were willing to give up the Senate seat just to keep her out of the office,” Norton said.
The elephant in the room
Lombardo, this year’s questionable Green Party candidate, appears to be part of a ploy to take votes away from Gov. Katie Hobbs. The incumbent Democrat has two potential Republican challengers in the general election: the Turning Point-backed U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, or the more moderate U.S. Rep. David Schweikert.
We called the number listed on Lombardo’s nomination filing to ask her about it, but whoever answered seemed to have picked up by mistake, grumbled, “This is why I need another phone — all I get are endless phone calls,” and then hung up.
Regardless of which GOP candidate Lombardo’s alleged spoiler effort is ultimately meant to benefit, she appears more ideologically aligned with the farther-right Biggs — she’s sold “Kari Won” buttons and supported the legislative campaign of a QAnon candidate, the Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports.
The Instagram page for Lombardo’s “T3 Designs” business shows some very patriotic buttons for sale.
Lombardo’s case so far is reminiscent of Hernandez’s — the candidate Norton says he was recruited to oust. In addition to having little publicly available information about their campaigns, both Green Party candidates used Republican-affiliated lawyers to stay on the ballot when their nomination signatures were challenged.
Hernandez never reported a single expense on his campaign finance reports. Lombardo, so far, hasn’t reported any either. Yet both used paid petition circulators to qualify for the ballot, with no disclosure of who financed the effort.
Norton says that, during his campaign, he had enough name recognition to get people to sign his petition. But he never met the Democrats who donated to his campaign.
“There's always buckets of money floating around,” he said. “There are enough people with their own political action committees and independent expenditure funds — it's impossible to track money. I think people have just given up on it.”
Norton ultimately cast his fake Green Party run as a public service — a way to keep Hernandez from tipping the election just enough to help hand Lake a U.S. Senate seat.
But of all people, why was Norton the one tapped to do it?
“I was the only guy ballsy enough,” he said.
Battling from behind: As Republicans lead in Arizona party registration numbers, the Democratic National Committee is staffing up organizers to register more voters across the state, Stephanie Murray reports for the Republic. They aim to hire and train 50 fellows by mid-May and are running a bilingual program to convince more Spanish-speaking residents to sign up to vote.
Heap v. Supes, continued: The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Wednesday to challenge a judge’s ruling that their election power-sharing agreement with Recorder Justin Heap was unfair to his office, the Republic’s Ronald Hansen reports. Supervisors on the Republican-controlled board, like Chair Kate Brophy McGee, claim there is too much confusion in the ruling and are asking Judge Scott Blaney to suspend it. If he rejects that request, the board will file an appeal.
Reluctant support: The Colorado River’s four Upper Basin states have agreed to release about 325 billion gallons of water from a Wyoming reservoir to Arizona’s Lake Powell, the Colorado Sun reports. Now, the states are waiting on approval from the Department of the Interior so that the lake’s water level remains high enough to supply electricity to more than 350,000 homes through the Glen Canyon Dam.
“Nobody’s incredibly anxious to do this,” Colorado’s Commissioner Becky Mitchell said before a vote. “All in reluctant favor?” she said, followed by unanimous approval.
Tech City: Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego announced that the city is starting an initiative to attract tech businesses focused on the emerging field of quantum computing, Jeremy Duda reports for Axios. During her “State of the City” speech, she also announced a $100 million investment by a bioscience company in a new Phoenix facility, touted the light rail expansion and highlighted new efforts by the Phoenix Housing Trust Fund to cover affordable housing permits.
You don’t need to invest $100 million in the Agenda to make a difference — we’ll gratefully accept more modest support.
Good job, everyone: Experts are predicting that gas prices in Arizona could reach an all-time high if the Iran War drags on for another four to six weeks, KJZZ’s Amelia Monroe reports. In other Middle East-related Arizona news, Republicans in the Arizona Legislature are hard at work passing a resolution that would require state documents to refer to the West Bank using the Old Testament names “Judea” and “Samaria,” per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. The resolution has no force of law.
Last week, lawmakers and staff from the Arizona House and Senate continued a bipartisan tradition and squared off in a softball game. The Senate ended up rocking the House in a 16-6 rout.
But lawmakers returned to the diamond on Wednesday evening at Tempe Diablos Stadium for a charity game against Capitol lobbyists, billed as a “strikers v. stalkers” contest.
We couldn’t make it, but we got the scoop from GOP Rep. Justin Wilmeth, who emceed the event and did play-by-play.
“Lobbyists won 11-7,” Wilmeth told us via text message. “Guess all the rest of their stuff is dead now ¯\(ツ)/¯.”
On the House floor hours before the game, he and Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci roasted both their colleagues and a few lobbyists with a “10 reasons why lobbyists or lawmakers will win” list, à la David Letterman.
Here are our favorite roasts:
“(Republican Rep.) Alex Kolodin takes one hour arguing a strike call, causing lobbyists to binge drink and pass out.”
“(Dem) Sen. Brian Fernandez is told to run home, and he does… to Scottsdale, I mean, Yuma!”
“(GOP) Sen. David Gowan refuses to play because he’s denied per diem for the drive to Tempe Diablos Stadium” (Wilmeth added: “There’s also no steaks.”)
“(Lobbyist) Mike Williams confiscates all softball bats from the legislators and demands we use only his vendor bats.”
“(Lobbyist and former lawmaker) Steve Kaiser hits a grand slam, but on his way to second base resigns from the team.”