The grass-roots activists powering the movement have become increasingly divided on core questions such as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state or national level or closely align itself with the Republican Party, POLITICO found in interviews with tea party organizers in Washington and across the country.

Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.

“These groups don’t play as well together as they should,” said Kevin Jackson, a St. Louis-based conservative author and activist who has spoken at dozens of tea party-type rallies and is traveling across the South with a convoy sponsored by the national Tea Party Patriots group…

Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a nonprofit that has conducted organizer-training sessions for many tea party activists, said “the next 3 to 6 months” are going to be critical in determining “what’s going to happen with the tea party movement. Are they going to be a bunch of fingers, or are they going to come together to be a fist?”