Democrats in four states are accused of colluding with tea party candidates. | AP Photo Dems accused of tea party tampering

Nationally, Democrats say they intend to campaign against the tea party movement. But locally, Democratic officials and activists in at least four states now stand accused of collaborating with tea party candidates in an attempt to sabotage Republican challengers in some of the closest House races in the nation.

The charges of dirty tricks are being leveled in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey and Florida — and they involve more than a half-dozen contests that could tip the balance of power in the House.


The accusations range from helping tea party activists circulate candidate petition sheets to underwriting the creation of official tea parties, which then put forth slates of candidates that local conservatives accuse of being rife with Democratic plants.

In all of the affected races, the outcome is expected to be close enough that a third-party candidate who wins just a few percentage points could end up swinging the outcome to the Democratic congressman or candidate.

“The Democrats have come to the realization that they can’t win on issues, and with their flawed candidates, so they are forced to skirt the rules by running candidates who they hope can split the vote with Republicans,” said Paul Lindsey, a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman.

Democratic officials deny there is any grand conspiracy.

"The DCCC has nothing to do with this," said Ryan Rudominer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But the evidence of campaign tampering in at least two states is hard to dismiss. In Michigan, the party chairman in suburban Detroit’s Oakland County now concedes that one of his top aides played a role in helping nine tea party candidates get onto the ballot for various offices across the state — including the open 1st Congressional District and the 7th Congressional District, held by vulnerable freshman Democratic Rep. Mark Schauer.

“We have to assess internally what we do next,” Democratic Chairman Mike McGuinness told the Detroit News. “We need to make sure staff is operating within the bounds of our purview, which is helping the Democratic Party.” McGuinness did not return requests for comment from POLITICO.

Recruitment of so-called straw candidates or spoilers is a time-honored, if less than reputable, tradition in American politics. But in this case, some Democrats appear to be in cahoots with ideological adversaries whose ideas they hope to use as weapons against Republicans in the fall.

Now, seven House seats are the subject of controversies that are spawning threats of lawsuits and criminal complaints and even pitting conservative tea party activists against one another.

One of those activists is Jim Schneller, who is running to fill the suburban Philadelphia-based seat left vacant by Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, who is running for the U.S. Senate.

The seat is among the Republicans’ top targets this fall, and the contest between Democratic state Rep. Bryan Lentz and Republican Pat Meehan is viewed as a tossup. The entry of a third- party candidate, however, could scramble that balance — which prompted Meehan’s campaign to scrutinize Schneller’s credentials.

According to its analysis, 3,800 of the 4,200 voter signatures gathered to put Schneller on the ballot were collected by Democrats. And among those who helped the tea party candidate are Colleen Guiney, the chairwoman of the Swarthmore Democratic Party and a Lentz supporter, and Nicholas Allred, who works for the Swarthmore College Democrats.

Bryan Kendro, Meehan’s campaign manager, accused Lentz’s backers of trying to “split the conservative vote by using Jim Schneller as nothing more than a prop.”

In an interview with POLITICO, Schneller said he’s been disappointed by the Republican assault on his legitimacy. “My signatures were gathered by volunteers,” said Schneller. “We didn’t go around screening signatures or signors.”

Schneller, who once filed a lawsuit to force President Obama to present his birth certificate, said he jumped into the race because he believes he can win it.

“Being someone who believes in the American system, it was difficult to hear people say that I was conniving or actually colluding or even show some disdain for the fact that the vote [margin] could be changed by my candidacy,” he said.

Yet after the POLITICO interview, a reporter with PoliticsPA presented the Meehan evidence to Schneller, and he took a different tone, calling it “dreadful. I regret that there might be some appearance of badness either to me or the Democrats.”

The secretary of state still must certify the Schneller petitions, and a Meehan spokesman said the campaign is still mulling a challenge.

Challenges already are being lodged against some of the 23 candidates running as part of the newly minted Tea Party of Michigan.

Even before the candidate roster was released last month, the suspicions of tea party activists had been aroused when they learned that the founding father of the new state party is Mark Steffek, a retired United Auto Workers steward.

Among the candidates under scrutiny now are two currently vying for House seats.

One is Danny Davis, a former soldier and police officer, who is running in a race that features a rematch between Schauer and Tim Walberg, the former GOP congressman he defeated in 2008 by just 7,432 votes — one of the closest races in the nation that year.

The Michigan Tea Party’s other House candidate is Lonny Lee Snyder, who is running for the Republican-leaning district of retiring Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak, whose vote in support of health care reform angered his base and prompted his retirement.

The race to succeed him is expected to be tight, which means Snyder’s third-party candidacy could have an impact. But there is scant information about the elusive candidate.

Snyder doesn’t have a website, the Tea Party headquarters didn’t release biographical information about his candidacy, and grass-roots tea party activists say they have never heard of him. When POLITICO called his home number, a man who answered said Snyder wasn’t home.

The mystery surrounding Snyder and other Michigan Tea Party candidates prompted some conservatives to do some digging. Jason Gillman, a local blogger with campaign experience, requested copies from state election officials of the “Affidavit of Identity” of all 23 candidates nominated by the new Tea Party.

As he perused them, Gillman noticed that nine of the affidavits were notarized by a person named Jason Bauer. When Gillman searched the name on the Internet, he discovered that Bauer worked for the Oakland County Democratic Party — information he quickly disseminated to the local news media and the conservative think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

As questions mushroomed, Steffek, the retired UAW steward, gave an interview to the local media, asserting that his new party and candidates are legitimate and his intentions pure. He said he joined the Tea Party ranks because of his disgust with big government and opposition to free-trade agreements.

Gillman isn’t buying it.

“They are the Toledo Mud Hens of the Democratic Party,” he said, in reference to the Detroit Tigers’ minor league baseball team. “He is not legitimate. He has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate tea party groups.”

But in an interview with POLITICO, Davis, the designated Tea Party candidate in the Schauer-Walberg rematch, insisted it’s actually the tea party activists who have been compromised.

For months, Davis, who originally filed to run in March as an independent, has been denied a chance to appear before tea party meetings or engage in their candidate debates, he said.

“They censured conservatives in favor of Republicans,” he said. “It really seemed they’d become an extension of the GOP and they were going to push a Republican candidate no matter what. They were scared to death of somebody who might split the vote.”

Vote splitting is a worry shared by conservatives in New Jersey, where the surprising elevation of a third-party candidate could influence the outcome of the tough reelection race of Democratic freshman Rep. John Adler against Republican Jon Runyan.

Runyan’s aides began looking into the background of New Jersey tea party candidate Peter DeStefano after Adler’s campaign released an internal poll that showed DeStefano drawing 12 percent of the vote. Local conservatives were also miffed that most of DeStefano’s conservative firepower seemed unusually directed toward Runyan, rather than the Democrat Adler.

In the course of the Runyan campaign’s research, aides discovered that one of the signatures on DeStefano’s ballot petition turned out to be of a former Adler campaign aide.

They also took note that DeStefano switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat in April and then switched it again to unaffiliated just days before the state primary. As in Michigan, DeStefano’s low profile with the news media also became viewed as a sign that he was a shadow candidate.

But last month, a reporter with PolitickerNJ.com tracked DeStefano down at his framing shop in Mount Holly, and the candidate flatly denied being a Democratic Trojan horse. (DeStefano did not return messages from POLITICO left at the business.)

DeStefano said he got into the race after tea party candidate Justin Murphy was defeated by Runyan in the June 8 Republican primary. But that assertion hasn’t swayed some local activists, who are declaring him a nonmember of their movement.

A similar scenario is unfolding in Florida, where there is also evidence — though not conclusive — of Democratic tampering. There, accusations of trickery have sparked a bitter battle among tea party activists.

The skirmishing began when grass-roots conservatives learned that a local attorney, Fred O’Neal, and a Republican political consultant in Orlando, Doug Guetzloe, had registered the Florida Tea Party with state election officials. Within months, the two sides were engaged in a legal battle over who had the right to the tea party name.

As local activists began digging into the backgrounds of O’Neal and Guetzloe, they discovered several connections between the consultant and Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, an outspoken freshman who is at the top of GOP target lists.

Grayson advertised on Guetzloe’s conservative talk show. He also appointed Guetzloe to a small-business advisory group and Guetzloe’s son interned in the Democrat’s congressional office.

Armed with those links, tea party activists across the state accused the two men of forming a front group designed to help Democrats in tight elections.

But Grayson’s office pointed out that the polarizing congressman had advertised on Guetzloe’s show before in an attempt to reach out to libertarians disaffected with the Republican Party — a claim backed up by campaign finance disclosure reports.

“This story is conspiracy theory, nothing more,” Sam Drzymala, a Grayson spokesman, said in an e-mail to POLITICO.

Still, the accusations grew more heated when the Florida Tea Party released a slate of 20 candidates to run for state and federal offices.

Although the vast majority of the challengers are aimed at state officials, the organization recruited candidates for three important House races — two Republican-held open seats and the Grayson contest.

“The recent flurry of last-minute filings by so-called ‘tea party candidates’ looks awfully suspicious when many of the candidates were recently registered Democrats and have filed to run in districts hundreds of miles away from their residences,” Florida Republican Party Chairman John Thrasher said.

While those charges may be fitting for some of the tea party’s state candidates, they fall flat in the case of Randy Wilkinson, an established conservative activist and elected Polk County official running in the open 12th District, and Peg Dunmire, a third-party candidate running against Grayson who has pictures of herself at tea party events in Washington.

Little is known about Roly Arrojo, a candidate in the open 25th District, who has not released a biography and didn’t return phone calls.

Florida Tea Party’s O’Neal claims that, despite their conservative credentials, his candidates have faced improper pressure tactics, and he is preparing to file a criminal complaint with local law enforcement officials and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Rival tea party activists are behaving “just like the South, in the good old days, when you could intimidate a black candidate off the ballot,” O’Neal said. “We are hoping those days are gone.”

As for charges that he and his new party are in cahoots with Grayson, O’Neal said: “Can you print ‘Bullshit'?”