Democratic Staffer Caught Anonymously Trolling Conservative Website

"A junior staffer did a stupid thing," says the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

WASHINGTON — If you're a state-level partisan political blogger and a trolly comment is posted to your website, you fantasize that your blog is so important someone from the opposite party is attacking you anonymously.

On Wednesday, one Republican blogger in South Dakota was living the dream.

Pat Powers, the operator of South Dakota War College, tracked an anonymous comment on his blog — attacking Powers for supposedly praising former Gov. Mike Round's bid for the Republican nomination for Senate while attacking other contenders — to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. The DSCC told BuzzFeed the anonymous comment was not standard procedure.

"A junior staffer did a stupid thing," said Justin Barasky, a spokesperson for the DSCC. "This is not news, and the DSCC isn't trolling right wing blogs. The NRSC however is inserting themselves into the South Dakota primary, endorsing Mike Rounds over more conservative candidates."

Rounds is seen as the National Republican Senatorial Committee's choice for the nomination, though the NRSC has not formally endorsed anyone in the primary. Democrats would likely prefer a more conservative candidate than Rounds to face their nominee in the open-seat race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson.

Powers told BuzzFeed he doesn't usually check where blog comments come from, but this one jumped out so he dug around a little and quickly struck gold.

"It isn't something I do very often, as most commenters are 'good guests,' keep it on topic, and issue oriented, and don't poke at myself as the editor," he said. "So when this one did, I looked, and got a good, long laugh at their faux concern over the poor mistreated Republicans."

On his blog, the discovery of the comment from the DSCC staffer led Powers to do some trolling of his own, poking fun at the fact that a strong Democratic candidate in the race has yet to emerge.

"If only they spent their time recruiting qualified candidates of their own," he wrote.

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