Following a week of audit-fueled turmoil, Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s gubernatorial campaign team will reorganize under a new manager who previously worked in the lieutenant governor’s office.
The new campaign manager, Matt Dougherty — who starts on Friday — also previously served as a Congressional aide for various lawmakers, including Delaware’s U.S. Senator, Tom Carper, according to a spokesman for Hall-Long’s campaign.
Dougherty’s ascension to the top spot coincides with the departures of Hall-Long’s campaign director, Quentin Heilbroner, and her finance director, Sydney Diewald.
Asked if Dougherty is replacing Heilbroner, Hall-Long’s spokesman Dan McCormick said that is “fair-ish” to say.
He said Dougherty will give a new “focus to the campaign going forward in the final few weeks.”
When pressed, McCormick also acknowledged that frustrations exist among the departing staff members, but asserted that Heilbroner and Diewald are leaving the campaign amicably.
Hall-Long is a leading candidate to become Delaware’s Democratic nominee for governor, with recent polls showing her lead over opponents ranging from 2% to the double digits. The primary election will occur on Sept. 10.
Her staffing shakeup follows a week of turmoil for her campaign, sparked by the July 25 release of an audit report that found that Hall-Long’s husband — Dana Long — withdrew nearly $300,000 from her candidate committee account between 2016 and 2023.
The total exceeded the amount he gave to Hall-Long’s campaigns by about $33,000, according to the report, which had been commissioned by the Delaware Department of Elections.
Over the years, Dana Long – who had served as Hall-Long campaign treasurer – frequently used his personal credit card to pay campaign expenses, even when his wife’s political account had plenty of money, the report stated.
Then, he would periodically transfer cash back into his own private bank account. He did so without the aid of spreadsheets to track his payments, the report stated.
Following the release of the report last week, Hall-Long’s Democratic opponents in the governor’s race – Collin O’Mara and Matt Meyer – separately called for further investigations.
O’Mara, Delaware’s former top environmental regulator, said the state attorney general should appoint an independent counsel to probe further into the controversy, according to a WHYY report.
Meyer, who serves as New Castle County’s executive, said U.S. prosecutors should open an investigation.
Meanwhile, Hall-Long has denied the report’s central finding but hasn’t provided details to support why she believes the report’s conclusions are in error. Last week, she released statements to several media outlets, saying “our family has loaned the campaign more money than we have been reimbursed.”
The release of the audit report followed months of scrutiny and suspicions around Hall-Long’s campaign finances that began last fall with another shakeup of her campaign staff.
At the time, several staffers resigned from Hall-Long’s then-fledgling gubernatorial campaign after learning that her previous candidate committee had made large and unreported cash transfers to Dana Long.
In the subsequent months, Hall-Long hired a small Dover accounting firm to conduct a review of her finances. By November, she released to the election department a string of amended campaign finance filings going back to 2016.
Since then, her opponents and members of the media have repeatedly called on Hall-Long to release the accountant’s review, which she claimed only discovered financial reporting errors that were subsequently corrected in her amended campaign finance reports.
