Tea Party Group to Form Super PAC

The Tea Party-linked conservative group FreedomWorks will create a Super PAC with the goal of raising $20 million during the 2012 election cycle, exploiting shifts in campaign law that permit independent groups to collect and spend unlimited amounts of money advocating for and against candidates.

But in a twist, the new group will raise its money in small-dollar increments from grass-roots donors, officials at the group said Friday, and it will spend its money almost entirely on grass-roots organizing and getting Tea Partiers and other fiscal conservatives to the ballot booth.

Most of the existing Super PACs, whether Democratic- or Republican-leaning, have raised their money from small groups of wealthy donors writing large checks. And since 2010, that money has financed barrages of negative advertising, much of it directed at Democrats by conservative groups that have significantly outgunned their liberal counterparts. The leading Republican-oriented Super PAC, Crossroads, founded by Karl Rove and other seasoned Republican hands, hopes to raise as much as $240 million by the end of 2012.

"I don't see how you get a vote by spending money on an ad that some consultant drew up and some guy is watching on his couch," Dick Armey, the former Republican congressman from Texas who is chairman of FreedomWorks, said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. Mr. Armey said that spending millions of dollars on advertising was, in his view, "a terribly ineffective way to run a campaign."

The new Super PAC's goal, Mr. Armey and the officials said, would be to use the unique features of such groups — the ability to raise money with fewer restrictions than a traditional political action committee and advocate for candidates more directly than a traditional nonprofit advocacy group — to activate over a million Tea Party volunteers during the 2012 cycle. A new Web site will allow volunteers anywhere in the country to contribute to phone-banks or download door-knocking maps. Supporters have already pledged over 26,000 hours of volunteering, officials at the group said.

And unlike Crossroads, which is focused on defeating Democrats, the FreedomWorks Super PAC plans to be highly active in Republican primaries, hoping to help fiscally conservative candidates prevail in races in Florida, Arizona and elsewhere. The group is already seeking the defeat of Orrin G. Hatch, the veteran Republican senator from in Utah.

"We are not interested in getting Republicans elected," said Matt Kibbe, the group's president. "We're interested in getting fiscal conservatives elected."