By MARC LEVY
HARRISBURG — Some day it might be remembered as the Tea Party primary.
The newly forming activist groups that identify heartily with calls for cutting taxes, red tape and government programs are organizing demonstrations, holding candidate forums and getting a boost from private conservative institutions in Pennsylvania.
Candidates, especially Republicans, who are running for office are heeding the message that is spawning challengers to GOP incumbents or establishment candidates.
“There aren’t many free passes,” said G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.
There are dozens of the groups in Pennsylvania, some that claim hundreds of members. Many identify with a local area – a few are beginning to organize under regional umbrellas
– and use the “tea party” moniker or the “9/12 Project” promoted by conservative commentator Glenn Beck.
Coordinators who now spend entire days organizing, funneling information and networking are, in some cases, people whose political activity was previously limited to voting. Next month, a few will be panelists or exhibitors at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, the state’s largest gathering of conservatives.
The goals and methods tend to vary from group to group, and some are able to provide few specifics as to how they want government to change, but they’ve made a strong impression.
Their refusal, so far, to endorse establishment candidates or form a third party may be their strongest hand. Some, perhaps many, tea party organizers want to remain independent and force Republicans, Democrats and independents to court them.
“This is not Republican versus Democrat anymore, and this is what has both parties scared to death,” said Joe Hilliard, 44, an Allentown resident who is an assistant organizer of an area group.
Rob Gleason of Johnstown, the Republican State Committee chairman, said the opposite is true: He welcomes the interest, even if some of it is awakened by a perceived failure of Republicans to adhere to party principles.
“I don’t feel a bit threatened,” Gleason said. “I’ve met with them. My doors are open.”
Rather, Gleason views the movement as like many before it: Disgusted voters who sat out an election or two and are returning to support goals they previously shared with Republicans.
When the Pennsylvania Republican Party chartered buses full of activists to support Scott Brown’s ultimately successful candidacy for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, tea party members filled some of the seats, he said.
One tea party member acknowledges some neglect.
“The political parties haven’t treated the people very well, and vice versa,” said McKay Sailer, 32, of Wexford, the organizer of the Pittsburgh 9/12 Project who is running for a seat on the Republican State Committee. “You have to put some skin in the game and a lot of people haven’t done that.”
But, the tea party doesn’t seem ready to move into the GOP’s offices, and a candidate who is endorsed by the Republican State Committee won’t get any credit for that, some organizers say.
“I think that they have a little more to prove,” said Sailer, whose group recently hosted the GOP’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate, state Attorney General Tom Corbett. “They might be questioned a little more aggressively. There’s some suspicion there.”
That might provide an opening to Corbett’s rival for the GOP gubernatorial nod, state Rep. Sam Rohrer.
As the Republican State Committee met to endorse Corbett and other candidates in February at a Harrisburg hotel, Rohrer hosted a daylong “Mobilize for Liberty” conference down the hall. The counter-convention, which featured speeches by conservative activists and training in such subjects as blogging and political activism, drew about 250 people.
Still, tea party activism is an unwieldy thing: It has discordant elements and no unifying leader.
But pollsters say its energy is undeniable – concern over the mounting national debt is providing fuel – and draws comparisons to another populist episode in the early 1990s when a billionaire Texan financed his own independent campaign on a platform of balanced budgets and fiscal restraint.
“The closest this comes to in our lifetime,” Madonna said, “is Ross Perot.”
