Holt -- More than 500 tea party supporters jammed a Baptist church in Holt Friday night for a raucous meeting that sets the stage for a strong presence by the grassroots movement at today's Michigan Republican Party convention.
"We're the hottest ticket in town tonight," Michigan Tea Party Alliance spokesman Gene Clem said as he opened the meeting at Capitol City Baptist Church. "We want to build up as large a bloc of votes as we can, and take it to the (Republican) convention."
GOP candidates for attorney general and secretary of state made their pitches to the meeting delegates as Clem urged attendees to take straw votes on each of the races and then throw all tea party support behind the most popular candidate.
But the bloc voting concept rubbed some attendees the wrong way.
"Under what authority?" shouted Terry Davis, an executive board member of the Metropolitan Detroit Freedom Coalition, when Clem asked delegates to hold up cards showing whether they supported former Michigan Appeals Judge Bill Schuette or Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop in the attorney general's race.
"We are individual tea parties, all 27 of us," Davis said, referring to the various tea party groups around the state.
It turned out to be a moot point. Clem said the straw poll was roughly a tie with Schuette and Bishop getting about 125 votes each. Given that outcome, organizers couldn't recommend a bloc vote for either of them.
"What it means is both of these guys are going to have to campaign like hell at the convention," Clem said.
Dennis Moore, director of the Willow Run Tea Party Caucus, acknowledged bloc voting can be a problematic concept in a movement whose supporters pride themselves on their independence.
An independent streak "is one of our greatest strengths and it's also one of our greatest weaknesses," Moore said. Clem said as many as 600 to 1,000 of the roughly 2,000 Republican Party delegates could be tea party supporters.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder, whose anti-abortion views worry some tea supporters as not strong enough, did not attend Friday's meeting. But Snyder's pick for lieutenant governor, Rep. Brian Calley, R-Portland, received a warm reception.
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