When [Republican candidate for Governor of Colorado] Scott McInnis appeared on Fox News last month underneath a title calling him the “Tea-Party-backed candidate” for governor, he triggered a tempest. Tea Party leaders fired off angry e-mail messages and public statements insisting that he was not their choice.

“Let it be known that we will not be used by any party or candidate!” Lu Ann Busse, the head of a coalition of Tea Party brethren known as 9/12 groups, declared at a “Defend the Republic” rally where she was invited to set the record straight after Mr. McInnis’s appearance.

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“They thought the platform was going to tie into what we were after, that we would be one big happy family,” said Lesley Hollywood, the leader of the Northern Colorado Tea Party.

Mr. McInnis was promoting the platform on Fox News when they identified him as the Tea Party candidate.

Ms. Hollywood was on the telephone with Ms. Busse, the coalition leader, when she saw the interview. “Did you see that?” she shouted. She sent an e-mail message to her members warning that they were “being played like pawns,” and another to Mr. Wadhams expressing her “extreme disgust” at the “blatant hijacking of the Tea Party.”

Tea Partiers noted that Mr. McInnis made no effort to correct the host, Neil Cavuto, when he called Mr. McInnis “the country’s biggest Tea Party candidate.”

Ms. Busse said Mr. McInnis had failed to get support from Tea Partiers because he received low to middling scores on fiscal conservatism from the Colorado Union of Taxpayers and the National Taxpayers Union during his years as a state representative and a congressman. But Tea Party groups also say he has ignored invitations to their candidate forums and other events.

“My frustration is, I have to do all of this work, now the G.O.P. wants us to do what they want to do?” Ms. Hollywood said. “If we’re the ones doing the work, it has to be the other way around.”