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Mass. GOP gubernatorial candidates trade blows over bot accusations after accounts flood Mass Daily News poll singing Minogue's praises

Sunday, March 15, 2026•
15 min read
MDN Staff
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Mass. GOP gubernatorial candidates trade blows over bot accusations after accounts flood Mass Daily News poll singing Minogue's praises

An X poll ignited a war of words between the two leading Republican campaigns

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BOSTON — The Massachusetts Republican governor's race took an ugly turn this week when what started as a simple X poll devolved into a full-blown war of words between the Mike Minogue and Mike Kennealy campaigns — complete with bot accusations, a DOJ reference, and an AI fact-check.
The fight kicked off after Mass Daily News posted a routine governor's race poll on X on Thursday asking which Republican candidate voters were supporting.
Within hours, pro-Minogue replies poured into the thread. Supporters cited his business background, his role in launching the state audit, and his pledge to forgo a salary as governor.
The reply section also featured endorsements from notable Massachusetts Republican figures. Geoff Diehl, who ran against Healey in 2022, replied: "Healey is Baker, Part II. Same policies, different day. We need a departure from business as usual on Beacon Hill. @MikeMinogueABMD is the way!" "Healey is Baker, Part II." Interesting. Diehl did not elaborate.
Geoff Diehl reply endorsing Mike Minogue
Former state Rep. Geoff Diehl endorses Minogue in the MDN poll replies (Screenshot / X)
Former MassGOP chairman Jim Lyons echoed the sentiment.

The Kennealy camp opens fire

Brian Wynne, a pollster and senior advisor to the Kennealy campaign, wasn't buying it. Wynne posted a time-lapse video showing Minogue's poll votes arriving in "suspicious bursts of 25, 50, and 100."
Wynne didn't stop there. Over the next several hours, he posted four additional replies, each escalating the accusations — including a reference to a Department of Justice settlement involving Minogue's former company Abiomed, which paid over $3 million to resolve allegations of kickbacks to doctors who installed its heart pumps.
He even tagged Grok, the xAI chatbot built into X, and asked it to analyze the poll data. Grok obliged — and didn't hold back.
Logan Trupiano, Kennealy's communications director, went further in a statement provided to Mass Daily News.
"Mike Minogue is used to buying what he wants — commercials, endorsements, doctors who will install his heart pumps in exchange for kickbacks, and even the appearance of grassroots support," Trupiano said. "Campaigns built on perception rather than genuine support are nothing more than vanity projects."
"While money may be able to purchase ads and social media bots, it cannot purchase trust or authentic support from the people of Massachusetts," he added. "When real voters step into the ballot box, they will decide this race — not a bank account."

The Minogue camp fires back

John Milligan, Minogue's convention director, pushed back in a statement to Mass Daily News.
"No bots were used by the campaign," Milligan said. "Unlike these desperate and pathetic attacks from others, this is what real grassroots support looks like. The overwhelming support for Minogue and positive commentary is just a snapshot of what we're seeing across Massachusetts."
Minogue himself celebrated the poll results on X.

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What Mass Daily News found

To cut through the accusations, Mass Daily News conducted its own independent analysis of the poll's reply thread using a combination of X's developer API — which provides programmatic access to platform data including tweet metadata, user profile attributes, and public engagement metrics — and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, one of the most advanced large language models currently available, to systematically review the posting history, profile characteristics, account creation patterns, and activity fingerprints of every account that left a pro-Minogue reply.
The findings were mixed — but notable.
At first glance, many of the pro-Minogue replies looked like genuine grassroots support. Accounts with real profile photos, established histories, and individually written responses cited specific policy positions — the state audit, Minogue's business record at Abiomed, his pledge to refuse a salary. Several identified themselves as Republican delegates. The comments read like real people making a real case for their candidate.
But it took a turn when Mass Daily News started pulling account data on the rest of the thread. More than a dozen replies came from accounts that still displayed X's default profile image — the generic silhouette that appears when a user has never uploaded a photo. Some were old accounts that had been dormant for years. Others were brand new — created this month, just in time for the poll.
Here's what Mass Daily News found on each:
@KelleyHarr423 (Kelley Harris) — Account created September 2025. Default avatar. Zero followers, four following. One tweet ever:
@JenDanielsHW (Jennifer Daniels) — Account created August 2022. Default avatar. Three followers, nine following. One tweet in nearly four years on the platform — the poll reply:
@MarkFergus8o (Mark Ferguson) — Account created October 2025. Default avatar. Zero followers, zero following. Three posts, none visible on the timeline:
@ALVU4640230 (AL. V. U.) — Account created March 2026 — as in, this month. Auto-generated username. Zero followers, one following. Two total posts, both in the Mass Daily News poll thread:
@mauricefrom508 (Maurice) — Account created March 2026. One follower, 11 following. One post ever — the poll reply. Unlike the others, this account had a custom profile picture, but was otherwise indistinguishable from the pattern:
@MarieStoeckel (Marie Stoeckel) — Account created November 2014. Default avatar. Two followers, seven following. One post in over eleven years on the platform:
At least half a dozen other accounts in the thread followed the same pattern — default avatars, auto-generated usernames, and anywhere from one to four total posts across years on the platform.
Who's behind the suspicious accounts is anyone's guess. It could be the Minogue campaign. It could be the Massachusetts Democratic Party trying to make the GOP frontrunner look bad. It could be a rogue group of very enthusiastic citizens who all happened to dust off dormant X accounts on the same day. For all we know, it could be Russia — though we'd be genuinely impressed if a foreign intelligence operation cared this much about a Massachusetts Republican primary poll. Mass Daily News isn't pointing fingers — we're just sharing what we found. We'll leave the accusations to the campaigns.

This isn't the first time

The bot accusations surrounding the Mass Daily News poll are not a one-off. In December, Chester Tam, a 2026 Republican candidate for state representative in the 9th Bristol District who also runs an independent series of "Who Can Beat Healey?" polls on X, reported that his third round drew 8,579 total votes — compared to just 1,300 in round one and 900 in round two. Tam noted "multiple documented rapid vote increases, including jumps of 3,000+ votes in roughly an hour," and cited Grok's analysis concluding with "95%+ confidence that the major spikes aligned with patterns typically seen in automated/coordinated (non-organic) voting activity."
For the sake of fairness, Mass Daily News ran the same analysis on Kennealy and Shortsleeve supporter activity across both the Mass Daily News and Chester Tam polls. Neither campaign showed similar patterns of suspicious account activity — no egg avatars, no accounts with zero posting history, no coordinated bursts from dormant or suspicious profiles.
The Kennealy camp did openly mobilize supporters on Chester Tam's poll. Jessica Machado, a Kennealy surrogate, quote-tweeted it twice urging supporters to vote for Kennealy.
Even Trupiano himself — the same communications director who accused Minogue of buying the appearance of support — quote-tweeted the same Chester Tam poll urging people to vote for Kennealy.
To be clear: telling your supporters to go vote in a poll isn't against any rules, and Mass Daily News isn't suggesting otherwise. But once campaigns start blasting polls to their email lists and group chats telling everyone who to vote for, the results stop reflecting what actual voters think. It's not a poll anymore — it's a head count of who saw the text first. The number at the end doesn't tell you anything about the race. It tells you which campaign was more online that day.
That's the thing about X polls in a contested primary: the moment organized supporters flood in, whatever organic signal was there gets drowned out. It happens on both sides, and it makes the whole exercise kind of pointless as a measure of anything real. Will Mass Daily News keep running them? Absolutely. We're not here to pretend X polls are scientific — we're here because they're fun, and apparently so is the chaos that follows.
That said, there's still a meaningful difference between rallying real supporters to go click a button and whatever was happening with the dormant accounts in the Mass Daily News poll replies. Mobilizing your base is campaigning. Accounts with no tweets, no followers, and egg avatars suddenly springing to life after years of silence is something else entirely.

Meanwhile, in the actual race

While the Minogue and Kennealy campaigns spent the week tearing into each other, a UNH poll released last week showed Governor Maura Healey leading every Republican challenger by at least 25 points.
Brian Shortsleeve, the third major Republican candidate, was largely absent from the skirmish — a choice that may look increasingly wise if the primary electorate decides it's tired of watching the other two fight over Twitter polls instead of making the case against Healey.
The Massachusetts Republican convention is scheduled for April 25th. That's where delegates — real ones, not bots — will have their say.

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