JoAnna Mendoza owns stake in a political consulting firm worth up to $5 million
JoAnna Mendoza, an Arizona Democrat in one of the country’s tightest House races, portrays herself as a single mom who grew up in rural poverty, picking cotton and relying on food stamps, but her reality is far less relatable. The openly bisexual Marine Corps veteran is a millionaire political consultant with deep ties to far-left causes and left-wing groups affiliated with the billionaire liberal megadonor, George Soros.
As a consultant, Mendoza worked with one Soros-funded group that seeks amnesty for illegal aliens who arrived in the United States as children, and with a Soros-affiliated group that tours the country with a 20-foot, inflatable IUD as it campaigns for free birth control. Mendoza has said she would “decriminalize sex work” to help “trans folks, especially trans women of color,” and said she also supports decriminalizing “petty crimes,” including jaywalking and “spitting,” the New York Post reported.
As Mendoza tells it, she unexpectedly “fell into politics” after growing up in a rural Arizona family that relied on food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers and had her toiling in cotton fields when she was eight years old. But a review of Mendoza’s work history reveals that she is at best being selective when recounting her biography. After retiring from the military in 2016 (she enlisted at age 17), Mendoza went on to work as a senior congressional staffer before earning a stake worth between $1 million and $5 million in a liberal political consulting firm that works with Soros-funded nonprofits and some of the most prominent elected Democrats in Arizona. Now, several of those same organizations and politicians have endorsed her campaign to topple incumbent Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R., Ariz.) in what’s considered one of the most competitive House elections this year.
Mendoza launched her political career in 2018, working as a veterans service representative for former congressman Tom O’Halleran before serving as the campaign manager for his failed 2022 reelection campaign. From there, Mendoza broke out on her own as a political consultant, earning a minority stake in 2024 in Radar Strategies, a political consulting firm that works with the Arizona Democratic Party and Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), both of whom have since endorsed Mendoza’s 2026 campaign.
Those endorsements have helped Mendoza raise more than $5.3 million for her campaign through March and have made her the runaway favorite to be the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which is identified by the Cook Political Report as one of the few remaining swing districts in the country.
Political endorsements aside, Mendoza’s ties to Radar Strategies also served wonders for her bottom line. She reported her stake in the firm was worth between $1 million and $5 million and that the firm paid her a salary of $114,000 in 2024, according to her congressional candidate financial disclosure. Radar Strategies founding partner DJ Quinlan told the Washington Free Beacon that Mendoza “was invited in and joined us in 2024, and had a minority stake (as do all partners). She resigned her stake in the firm in 2025 to focus on her run for Congress.”
Quinlan did not say if Mendoza received any sort of payout for relinquishing her stake in his business. Mendoza’s campaign said she has not held a stake in Radar Strategies or received any compensation from the firm in over 13 months.
Mendoza also reported her professional ties to several left-wing organizations in her congressional candidate financial disclosure. She consulted for Americans for Contraception, a nonprofit group that has received $1.1 million from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations since 2022, which is best known for its roaming, inflatable IUD which it uses to promote greater access to birth control. She also served on the board of Children’s Action Alliance, a group that supports amnesty for illegal immigrants brought to America as children. Children’s Action Alliance is an affiliate of the Soros-funded Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Several of the organizations Mendoza reported working with have since endorsed her congressional campaign. That includes Vote Mama, a Soros-funded group that works to elect “Democratic moms” that once counted Mendoza as its Arizona state chair. She’s also identified as a dues-paying member of the Soros-funded Foreign Policy for America, a group that endorsed her campaign in December. FP4A, as it’s known, has a foreign policy worldview grounded in antiracism, sees “structural racism” as a major threat, and supported the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.
Mendoza’s ties to the Soros network could come back to bite her in her race as she seeks to flip Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District. Soros has been a major player in the Defund the Police movement, investing over $40 million to elect scores of liberal prosecutors across America in jurisdictions that have since been roiled by crime.
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