ON A COLD but sunny Wednesday in early February, Diana DiZoglio, the Massachusetts state auditor, stepped inside Lynn’s community access TV studio to meet with members of the local chamber of commerce.
With an aide in tow, DiZoglio worked the room like a pol in a union hall filled with voters, shaking hands and complimenting attendees on their clothing and hairstyles before launching into a stump speech.
She won the job in November 2022, after a decade spent in the state Legislature. Not even halfway through her first four-year term, DiZoglio has essentially returned to the campaign trail. She is lobbying voters, and emptying her own campaign coffers, to support an initiative she wants to put before voters this November – a ballot question authorizing her office to audit her former colleagues in the Legislature.
It’s not a move that makes friends on Beacon Hill, but that’s nothing new for the 40-year-old Methuen resident, who has ruffled feathers and angered those in power everywhere she’s been on her climb up the political ladder. If her campaign to audit the Legislature, driven by her call for greater transparency in an institution famous for doing its work behind closed doors, has rankled State House insiders, it’s been political gold for DiZoglio.
She’s become a regular on Sunday morning TV shows spotlighting political figures in the news, and she eagerly accepts speaking invitations around the state.
When the auditor’s position opened up two years ago with the retirement of three-term incumbent Suzanne Bump, DiZoglio was one of two Democrats who jumped into the race for what is probably the lowest profile statewide office in Massachusetts. Many voters have no idea who holds the post, never mind a clue about what the job entails.
Getting voters excited about your vision for poring over ledger sheets of obscure state agencies is not the stuff of eye-catching campaign headlines. But as the summer progressed – and with even the governor’s race turning into a barely-contested, sleepy affair – DiZoglio put the auditor’s race on the radar with the declaration that one of her top priorities would be probing the workings of the Legislature. That set off a debate over the office’s actual powers, with her rival voicing skepticism about whether a legislative audit was in bounds, and Bump, the outgoing auditor, agreeing with him, calling it a political play.
DiZoglio was undeterred. While her opponents, then and now, have talked about separation of powers principles and offered legal arguments that she doesn’t have the authority to actually audit lawmakers, DiZoglio has focused less on legalisms and instead spun the issue into the compelling narrative of a practiced politician. She has been telling a story anchored by a time-honored theme successfully invoked by statewide candidates from Bill Weld to Deval Patrick: an outsider vowing to take on the entrenched interests on Beacon Hill.
When she faces pushback from those in power, DiZoglio showcases it as a badge of honor. She told the Lynn business group gathering that months into her new job in 2023, she tried to walk into the Senate, having been invited by a lawmaker who was to deliver their inaugural speech. An apologetic court officer stopped her from entering – a courtesy routinely extended to former members – and DiZoglio instead went upstairs to the gallery, standing next to reporters.
“It’s just reflective of how folks are treated when they’re seeking transparency and accountability,” DiZoglio told the chamber of commerce members. (A spokesperson for the Senate president’s office suggested that DiZoglio was late for the speech, and the custom is to lock the doors once such remarks begin.)
One state lawmaker, echoing what other legislators have also said privately, noted that auditors typically come in, look at an entity’s financials and offer up ways to improve things. “That’s not what she wants to do,” the lawmaker said of what’s behind DiZoglio’s quest to land a legislative audit. “She wants to be the FBI. She wants to catalog the Legislature’s sins,” said the lawmaker, who did not want to be identified.
DiZoglio’s cataloging crusade has people wondering about her motives and end-game. Is this part of a sharp-elbowed vendetta against an institution that treated her poorly, a straightforward play for political visibility, or the sincere reform impulse of someone who saw up close the dysfunction on Beacon Hill? The answer depends on who is asked.
ORIGIN STORY
Born to a 17-year-old single mother who worked as a nurse’s aide, DiZoglio moved around, staying with grandparents and godparents, as money came in and out, and DiZoglio frequently changed schools.
Songs were a salve for a rough-and-tumble childhood; she fell in love with Whitney Houston’s music. She would sing in choirs, and DiZoglio said a conservative Pentecostal church, which she no longer attends, offered a stabilizing safety net.
She didn’t go to college right after graduating high school, eventually making her way to two community colleges, on a part-time basis, before landing an unlikely transfer to pursue a four-year degree. DiZoglio was admitted to Wellesley College on a scholarship obtained with the help of a community college professor who saw potential in her. The elite women’s liberal arts campus intimidated her, but also exposed her to diverse opinions and a sense of empowerment she didn’t feel as a child.
DiZoglio initially believed she was destined to run a youth center, helping young people facing the kind of tough odds she overcame. Before her college graduation, she worked as a cultural arts coordinator for a Lowell youth program.
But Beacon Hill came calling. The Spanish she had picked up in college came in handy when a friend of hers pointed her to a job as a legislative aide to Paul Adams, a Mormon Republican whose House district included the majority-Hispanic city of Lawrence.
Nearly every lawmaker has an origin story, something that spurred them to run for public office. DiZoglio’s dates to her time as a Beacon Hill aide.
In April 2011, in a late-night moment in an otherwise empty, darkened House chamber, a State House court officer discovered DiZoglio and Braintree state Rep. Mark Cusack. The incident occurred after a late-night party, and while House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s office issued a report saying nothing inappropriate happened and no rules were broken, rumors and gossip ricocheted around the building, creating a toxic workplace for her. DiZoglio later said she was sexually harassed in the aftermath of the episode.
Adams fired her, and the ordeal was capped by the pressure she felt to sign a termination and non-disclosure agreement from House lawyers (who misspelled her name as “Dianna DiZogli”). It provided severance and health benefits, but also came with a nondisparagement clause preventing her from publicly criticizing the House. The experience “opened up my eyes to how things really work up here,” DiZoglio said during a recent sit-down. “When I ended up coming back to run for office, that stayed with me.”
In 2012, after a stint working as the chief of staff for the president of the Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts, DiZoglio launched a Democratic primary challenge to North Andover state Rep. David Torrisi. “I would question whether she really is a Democrat or not,” Torrisi told the Boston Globe, noting that she had worked for a Republican lawmaker.
Unions, a key Democratic constituency that would back her future bids for higher office, rallied to her side as the 28-year-old picked up the support of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Laborers Local 175 flipped their support to DiZoglio from Torrisi, and that first campaign of hers was run out of their office in Methuen. “Given the adversity that was in her life, and coming from an economically disenfranchised district, she proved that if you work hard you can succeed,” said Michael Gagliardi, one of the union’s top officials.
DiZoglio was Torrisi’s first Democratic primary opponent in nearly a decade, but she eked out a narrow win, defeating him by 164 votes.
Two years later, she faced what looked like a tough reelection battle. “All the folks who didn’t like me the first time had an opportunity to try to get rid of me,” DiZoglio said. She got a red moped in order to speedily knock on voters’ doors. It was a grueling primary battle, filled with verbal jabs, but she prevailed.
Two weeks after she beat Phil DeCologero and another Democrat, she invited DeCologero for a beer summit at a North Andover restaurant and they buried the hatchet. Less than a decade later, he would come to work for her in the auditor’s office. She had proven herself to be a fighter, but DiZoglio was also learning to be a retail politician seeking to win over one-time foes.
Returning to the House, she didn’t exactly settle in. As a rank-and-file member, she became increasingly frustrated by the top-down way its leaders ran the chamber. Her loud declaration of independence came when she took to the House floor in 2018, in the thick of the #MeToo moment, as lawmakers were debating new internal policies defining how to deal with sexual harassment allegations.
DiZoglio argued that the House should ban non-disclosure or non-disparagement agreements, pointing to her own experience and effectively breaking the one she signed as an aide.
The night before the debate, DiZoglio was on the phone with a friend, Wes Ritchie, agonizing over the expected blowback. Both were former State House aides who met through Beacon Hill social circles, and they counted themselves among a group of young people who felt out of place in the building. “As a gay guy I was on the outs of that power structure,” Ritchie said. “Same with Diana as a woman.”
Not everyone agreed that non-disclosure agreements are improper. Defenders of the agreements say they can, if structured correctly, help victims who seek privacy. But her move placed the House speaker’s office in a rare defensive crouch. DeLeo said she did not mention harassment in 2011, at the time the agreement was reached. Just 21 legislators joined DiZoglio in supporting a ban on what she called a “silencing tactic” to help cover up wrongdoing with taxpayer dollars.
Days after the vote, she filed to run for an open state Senate seat. She cruised through the Democratic primary without an opponent, and beat a Republican newcomer in the general election with 66 percent of the vote.
The Senate is generally considered a more collegial place than the House, but DiZoglio would eventually level the same criticisms there about the tight grip leadership maintained over the chamber. After a compromise bill on police reform was released by House and Senate negotiators at the end of 2020, DiZoglio dinged them for giving lawmakers less than 24 hours to review the bill. “The Senate and the House are becoming strikingly and disturbingly similar these days in terms of process,” she wrote on Twitter.
Looking back on her four years in the Senate, DiZoglio said she would always be grateful to Senate President Karen Spilka for helping her pass a ban on non-disclosure agreements in the Senate, but added, “I wasn’t leadership’s favorite person over there.”
A MORALITY PLAY
When she jumped into the 2022 race for auditor, DiZoglio stuck with the anti-establishment themes that she sounded in her previous races, and leaned into her biography. She managed to tie her up-from-nothing story to the auditor’s watchdog role over the public purse-strings.
“I know what it’s like to struggle and to have to be scrappy, and without the investments made through state government and the investments of others, I would not have had the opportunities I did,” she said during a debate on WBUR. “So I know how important it is that our investments made through your tax dollars are spent wisely, because every wasted dollar puts another child’s future opportunities at risk.”
Running for an obscure state office that carries a bookkeeper’s aura is a challenging enterprise. The official charge of the office, which employs about 200 people, is to conduct audits at least every three years of some 200 different state agencies, dissecting their operations. Auditors typically issue dry reports detailing problems they’ve uncovered in an office and recommending improvements. DiZoglio pitched the race as a morality play, vowing to use the office to right the wrongs of Beacon Hill’s entrenched power structure by pulling back the curtain on the workings of the Legislature.
Her opponent in the Democratic primary, Chris Dempsey, a policy-smart former state transportation official, was hardly a suck-up to the status quo. He previously took on then-Mayor Marty Walsh and the Boston area business elite by helping lead opposition to bringing the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston, calling it a boondoggle that would leave taxpayers footing the bill.
But he pushed back against DiZoglio’s talk of auditing the Legislature, arguing it was outside the authority of the job. Dempsey wound up gaining the support of large swaths of the Democratic Party establishment, including DeLeo, who had by then retired as House speaker, as well as Bump, the outgoing auditor.
Jonathan Cohn, a leader of the advocacy group Progressive Massachusetts, which kept tabs on lawmakers through scorecards, backed Dempsey and said DiZoglio was a conservative-leaning Democrat in the House and the Senate, a function of her home base in blue-collar Methuen along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. During the auditor’s race, Cohn said, she undertook a “rebrand” to appeal to a statewide audience, looking to garner support from both progressives and conservatives.
She also brought the kind of campaign charisma to the race that wins votes apart from any policy pronouncements.
Brian O’Connor, a seasoned politico who worked in the 1980s and 90s for then-Congressman Joe Kennedy, was among the operatives who received a call from Dempsey early in the race, and agreed to help him. When he hit the campaign trail for Dempsey, O’Connor recalled seeing DiZoglio work the room at several different events. She came across as authentic, emotion-fueled, and unafraid. “The audiences were hers,” O’Connor said.
At one political breakfast he attended, she broke into song. O’Connor was reminded of the lore surrounding “Honey Fitz,” John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, who served as mayor of Boston and was also known for carrying a tune in service to campaigns. O’Connor sensed the appeal DiZoglio had in front of a crowd and relayed his impressions to Dempsey.
Dempsey responded that he was leading in the race, according to O’Connor. “Don’t be surprised if that disappears by Election Day,” O’Connor said he told him.
In the primary’s final tally, DiZoglio won 54 percent to Dempsey’s 45 percent. She cruised to an easy victory in the general election over Republican Anthony Amore.
‘A LESSON IN PATIENCE’
A year and change into the job, DiZoglio clearly chafes at some of its trappings, saying her new role has been “a lesson in patience.” For all her criticism of the Legislature, she says there are some things she relished in that role that she can no longer do in her new job. “One thing I do miss about the Legislature is being able to take to the floor, at any given time and just say whatever I feel like saying about whatever issue of the day,” she said.
Of course, there are those who think that is exactly what she’s doing with her call to audit the Legislature. “This whole effort is just pure politics,” Bump said when asked to assess DiZoglio’s high-profile effort.
Some on Beacon Hill clearly view her audit as political grandstanding or payback to legislative leaders who constantly sought to keep her in check. DiZoglio says they are more interested in “character assassination” and defending the status quo.
Both Senate President Spilka and current House Speaker Ron Mariano were dismissive of her audit, saying it is unnecessary, and her effort is a violation of separation of powers. Mariano had the House counsel send a letter to DiZoglio saying she “lacks any legal authority to conduct an audit.”
DiZoglio has said the audit is needed to scrutinize the Legislature’s budgets, procurement and how committee assignments are doled out, in order to discover “what is happening in the people’s house, where the people’s business is conducted, using the people’s money.”
When it comes to bankrolling the effort to put the legislative audit before voters in a ballot question this fall, DiZoglio has put her money where her mouth is. She emptied her campaign account last fall, dumping $105,000 into the ballot drive, roughly a third of the money raised in 2023 by the Committee for Transparent Democracy.
While the effort is a high-stakes move on her part, DiZoglio’s argument seems to resonate with voters. A UMass Amherst poll in October found that 67 percent would vote for the audit measure, while just 7 percent would vote no. The opposition is about as small a number as one could see in a poll question like this. But then again, it can be hard to find support for what seems like an effort to stifle more transparency and accountability from the Legislature.
Which is exactly the smart political calculation DiZoglio has made. What’s more, her effort has become a classic example of an insurgent campaign against the status quo that brings together disaffected groups on the political left and right.
Members of the Democratic State Committee, populated with liberal reformers, backed a resolution last year voicing support for the audit, and Erin Leahy, a Bernie Sanders supporter who runs the progressive group Act on Mass, which is critical of the Legislature’s secrecy, said she’s behind the effort. Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts also supports aspects of the audit, though he thinks some proponents are overselling what it can accomplish. “She understands how much of politics is theater,” Cohn said of DiZoglio. “I was never a fan of her politics but it’s easy to see how people see her as a compelling candidate.”
On the right-wing side, the Massachusetts GOP is fully supportive of the audit, and the ballot committee has raised contributions from the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and donors such as Ernie Boch Jr., a past supporter of Donald Trump.
DiZoglio says the odd bedfellows of the left and right that are backing the ballot question are united in an understanding of how power works. “When you’re taking on a powerful establishment such as it exists up here, you cannot do that in a silo,” she said. “You cannot do that on your own. You cannot be a one-woman show. You very much need all the support that you can get to challenge what’s going on. Because otherwise they will work to divide and conquer.”
So far, no campaign committee has been organized to fight against the ballot question. But the attorney general’s office, in its legal review of the audit ballot question, said that even if it were enacted by voters to become law, there could be questions about whether it’s constitutional for one part of government to take such action against another.
Regardless of the ballot question’s legal fate, the issue has clearly been good politics for DiZoglio, giving her far greater visibility than ever enjoyed by her predecessors. Where she hopes to go with that isn’t clear. But few expect her to stay in the job for as long as someone like the late Joe DeNucci, a one-time state rep who spent a quarter century as state auditor. She’s already set herself apart, throwing more haymakers at the Legislature in less than two years than the office saw in more than two decades under DeNucci, a former middleweight boxer who received a hero’s farewell from Beacon Hill when he retired in 2011.
O’Connor, the long-time Kennedy hand, said DiZoglio has the talent and ambition for higher office. “She doesn’t seem to me to be someone who’s going to bronze her green eyeshade and settle in for the long haul,” he said, invoking the shorthand reference to accountants and others who keep their heads down to focus on fine-grained details.
Back in Lynn’s community access TV studio, where DiZoglio was meeting with the local chamber of commerce, Rick Starbard, a former Lynn city councilor, joined the others in nodding along as she spoke of taking on the insular Legislature. He had helped Anthony Amore, her Republican opponent in 2022, but now is among the group of people, including Amore, who find themselves supporting her after trading political blows.
As the meeting ended, Starbard praised her singing ability, the hobby that she fashioned into a political skill. DiZoglio thanked him and couldn’t resist ending with a dig at Beacon Hill: “I think some of the legislative leaders thought I was leaving my day job.”