Upton supporters flooded local newspapers with letters supporting Upton and attacking Jack, using the talking points outlined above.  One fellow sent the same letter to three different papers.  Many of the letter-senders are or were part of the College Republicans [emphasis mine] at University of Michigan  and Western Michigan University (how the mighty have fallen).

The largest circulation paper in the 6th district is the Kalamazoo Gazette, which is part of a group of papers whose hosted at a single website, Mlive.com.  Any time it ran a story about the race, a number of commenters would post comments praising Upton and attacking Jack using the points listed above.  A little investigation identified 12 accounts that posted such comments almost exclusively; I dubbed them the "Upton trolls".  In fact, nine of the accounts were created on January 17, the day that Jack announced he was running.  Several of the accounts were subsequently deleted for violating Mlive's terms of use, while still others were created later.

One of the Upton trolls ventured over to RightMichigan.com, Michigan's leading conservative website, and posted a piece repeating many of the same smears.  The regular contributors quickly tore it apart in the comments.  A few days later, Upton sent out an email reproducing the piece and using RightMichigan's logo, but (unlike previous emails) with no link to the original piece.