Over at
Polstate, I've been posting for several months on the Renzi-Babbitt congressional race in AZ CD-1. These posts were (admittedly, and perfectly legitimately) slanted toward Paul Babbitt, the Democratic candidate, and they included a lengthy interview with Babbitt.
About a month after I began posting, I began to notice significant troll activity on the site. Individuals with names such as "Sherman Miller", "reality", and "moderately right" began posting detailed comments attacking my stories. These comments were too detailed and on-message to have been from random trolls; in fact, "Sherman Miller" admitted to close ties within the Renzi campaign and listed http://www.rickrenzi.com as his homepage. I began to suspect foul play.
Today, the truth was revealed when yet another troll attempted to derail one of my threads: these individuals could well be the same person, and appear to have been directed from inside the Renzi campaign.
According to site proprietor and AZ CD-1 newspaper reporter
Temple Stark, contacts with the Renzi campaign showed they were very, very interested in the site, apparently occasioned by Polstate's listing on Google News:
...Both the Babbitt and Renzi campaigns were aware of [Nonpartisan] and Polstate. In fact Renzi's press secretary said us showing up in Google was pretty damn handy when looking up mentions of his candidate.
[Renzi press secretary Matthew] Ash also expressed an interesting in contributing to Polstate - and thus ensued an awkward conversation. ... I had to turn him down as a contributor - a little too invested.
The latest troll (whose comments were deleted by Temple) named himself "Ash" -- though it's probably too much to hope for that it was the press secretary himself.
Also of note, a troll of similar style this afternoon invaded my new blog, No Purchase Necessary, arriving from Polstate and posting under the name "TV (Harry)". A little Googling discovered that the source was a Little Green Footballs regular named "Inspector Callahan". Mystery solved? Quite possibly. (The comment has now been deleted to protect the integrity of my site.)
I feel good knowing that as an Internet news service Polstate was viewed as a serious threat by some truly nasty Republicans. With the time spent by Republican trolls trying to derail my posts, some dozen votes could have been won on the ground in AZ CD-1. Another small step for us bloggers along the road to doing some serious good for our chosen candidates.