Why should Delaware care?
Delaware’s Republican Party represents more than 200,000 registered voters, as well as hundreds of annual donors. But the party hasn’t had one of its members hold a elected seat statewide since 2018. While party fortunes continued to look bleak in recent months amid financial disarray, leaders now say they have righted the ship.
Shortly after the new year, a political accountant who has handled the books for hundreds of conservative organizations, including the Delaware Republican Party, abruptly resigned from his post with the state’s GOP.
His departure – coming a month after Spotlight Delaware reported on money problems facing the state GOP – exposed further financial disarray within the party. In the subsequent weeks, GOP leaders scrambled to find a replacement, while federal regulators sent warnings that the party could face fines and a possible audit if it did not file a year-end campaign finance report, and answer questions about reports of negative cash balances.
Now, two months after the accountant’s resignation, Delaware GOP Chair Gene Truono said the party is recovering with a beefed-up fundraising strategy, and a new accounting firm that has filed its required federal reports.
Looking forward, Truono said the party is well positioned to rebuild its bank account and its base of power ahead of what could be its most consequential election cycle in years.
The comments are likely welcome news for party faithful who have watched the Delaware GOP not only suffer through recent financial turmoil but also through a decade of electoral losses in statewide races.
“2026 is going to be a good year for us,” Truono said. “Money is coming in. We’re able to hire people. We’re meeting our payroll.”
Truono further stated that his party’s previous campaign finance reports, which showed that a federal bank account was thousands of dollars in the red, were inaccurate. He said those reported negative cash balances were the result of accounting errors involving duplicate checks existing on the party’s books.
When party officials sought to correct the errors last fall amid scrutiny from Spotlight Delaware and others, Truono said their accountant, Thomas Datwyler, wasn’t responsive enough to allow the party to reconcile the books.
And, after the new year passed, Datwyler ended up “ghosting” the party altogether, Truono claimed.
But Datwyler tells a different story. When reached for comment, the embattled national political accountant said he didn’t respond to the party after the new year because he had resigned his contract in an email sent on Jan. 11.
He did so because the party had not paid his company for his previous year’s worth of work, he said.
“And I know what the financial situation is,” Datwyler said. “They don’t have any money. Even if those checks weren’t cleared or not, they still don’t have any money.”
Asked about Datwyler’s resignation, Truono said he never received a letter by email. The state GOP’s executive assistant, Paula Ireton, also stated that she had not received Datwyler’s resignation email.
Datwyler forwarded Spotlight Delaware the email he said he sent to the party in January. It included an attached letter from his company, Ax Capital, announcing the resignation.
When asked why the Delaware GOP had reported negative account balances in recent months, Datwyler described a different bookkeeping problem from the one Truono said existed.
While he agreed the party’s bank account was not currently in the red, he said it was only because past payments to party vendors had never been claimed.
“They have checks in the register that haven’t actually cleared the bank account,” he said. “They’re not duplicates. They were written … And, if they were ever cashed, obviously the bank would go negative.”
Civil penalties, an audit or legal enforcement?
In the wake of Datwyler’s departure, GOP officials said they scrambled to hire a new accountant that could compile the party’s year-end campaign finance report to send to federal regulators.
Federal and state campaign finance law requires political parties to regularly disclose to the public the amount of money they receive from donors – and how they spend it. The state GOP did file a campaign finance report in January related to its state election activities to the Delaware Department of Elections.
But the party ultimately missed the Jan. 31 deadline to file its federal report.
By mid-February, federal officials sent a sternly worded letter stating that a failure to file the year-end campaign finance report could “result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action.”
The letter followed another that was sent in January in which regulators demanded to know how the party could report that its federal bank balance sat more than $8,000 in the red.
It was the fifth month in a row the party reported a negative cash balance.
In the letter, the FEC stated that the party must respond by Feb. 16 and “Requests for extensions of time in which to respond will not be considered.”
While acknowledging the gravity of the federal demands, Truono said the party throughout February was working with a new vendor to resolve the situation. By the final business day of the month, the GOP filed its delayed financial disclosures. Within the documents, the party reported its cash balance no longer was in the red, but instead sat at about $19,000.
Election regulators have not sent additional letters to the party during the week since the filings, according to the Federal Elections Commission’s website.
Asked for his takeaways from the recent turmoil, Truono pointed squarely at Datwyler, saying the party wasn’t ”getting the kind of service that we expected or needed.”
“The major takeaway, for my part, was we had the wrong vendor, plain and simple,” he said.
Truono’s comments add to a mountain of high-profile criticism made by various political organizations across the country about Datwyler. In 2024, an attorney for the Conservative Nevada Leadership PAC filed a complaint with the FEC claiming that Datwyler had “a long history of running roughshod over federal campaign finance law.”
“The major takeaway, for my part, was we had the wrong vendor, plain and simple.”
Delaware GOP Chair Gene Truono
A year earlier, the Daily Beast reported that Datwyler had acted as a shadow treasurer for the campaign of disgraced-Congressman George Santos. The report claimed that while Datwyler managed the campaign’s books, he had listed on disclosure reports the name of another person as the treasurer.
When asked about the various news reports, Datwyler said he has worked for more than 1,000 political committees of various kinds over the past two decades. He said there are only about a dozen that have been unsatisfied with his work.
He also claimed that many of the public reports about him are the result of tips from “competitors in the industry that take a shot at me.”
He declined to state which of his competitors he suspects of spreading such information.
A chance of victory ahead?
In his interviews with Spotlight Delaware, Truono spoke at length about the GOP’s plan to launch a broad campaign to boost the party presence in the state in advance of this year’s consequential elections.
Specifically, party officials will focus on convincing more voters to register as Republicans, and on better communicating the party platform.
Truono said his party has a particularly ripe opportunity to take advantage of Democrats recent actions in the state that he said have been unpopular. He cited the state legislature’s decoupling last fall of the state’s tax code from that of the IRS.
Truono also said President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February has prompted some Democrats to call into his party office to announce that there were inspired to change their party registration.
If the GOP could capture enough new voters to win in a few state legislative races this fall, they could take away Democrats’ supermajorities in the General Assembly – which allow the party to raise taxes without Republican support in the House and the Senate.
Conversely, with a loss of just one seat in the House, the party could slide further to the periphery by giving Democrats the ability to pass Constitutional amendments without GOP votes.
For its federal campaigns this year, the state’s Republicans also will field candidates for Congress to face Delaware’s Democratic members of Congress – Rep. Sarah McBride and Sen. Chris Coons – up for reelection.
Truono said the party launched its new initiative in January, with two successful fundraisers. Those dollars have already allowed him to hire new people, he said.
Among the future new hires, Truono added, will also be data analysts who can identify individuals “who we can reach out to to either convince them to vote Republican or convince them to change their party affiliation.”
Spotlight Delaware reported in 2024 that the GOP had fallen to become the third largest political group in the state, following a surge of new independent voters registered through the state DMV’s automatic voter registration system. Democrats remained the largest contingent of registered voters at the time.
While the GOP is adding staff, it also recently lost a key employee. Truono noted that the party’s executive director Nick Miles no longer holds that position. He said that as chair of the party, he has the “right to appoint or unappoint” that position.
“In this case, I’m looking for someone else because he just didn’t meet my personal needs,” Truono said.
While he served as executive director, the state GOP had made regular payments to Miles, through a limited liability company, for what the party described as “legal consulting.” However, Miles is not a member of the Delaware Bar Association.
