AUGUSTA — Richard Ashcroft, a tea party activist from Richmond, is unhappy with the eight Republican senators who wrote an OpEd piece published Monday in several Maine newspapers. The piece was critical of Gov. Paul LePage’s caustic style and said he is creating too many distractions.

A LePage supporter, Ashcroft calls the senators the “gang of eight,” and he’s so angry that he’ll be working to see them all defeated when they run for re-election.

“All of us tea partiers are very disappointed,” Ashcroft said. “I’ll vote for a conservative Democrat over Roger Katz or any of the others.”

While Republican Party officials and Republican legislators on Monday downplayed the OpEd article, saying that the GOP remains united behind Paul LePage’s political agenda, there was plenty of consternation among the Party’s legion of hardcore conservative activists.

Kandi-Lee Hoy, 49, a Republican from South Portland, said she and a lot of her conservative friends like LePage’s blunt and plainspoken style. What they don’t like, she said, are the “whiners,” which is how she described the eight Republicans who signed their names to the OpEd.

She said they should be more aggressive in Augusta, not apologizing for the leader of their party.

“We want them to go up to Augusta to turn the state around, not to go up there and make friends,” she said.

On the Ray & Ted Show, a conservative radio talk show on WLOB, 80 percent of the callers on Monday were opposed to the authors of the OpEd piece.

The show launched “operation Kleenex” and urged its listeners to mail boxes of tissues to the State House.

“If they are going to whine in pubic, I want to make sure they’re going to have soft tissues to dry their eyes,” said co-host Ray Richardson.

Richardson said that LePage had apologized to the senators at a closed-door caucus meeting on Thursday, and it was “bad form” for the senators to air their criticism in public.

He said LePage’s opponents will now take advantage of what appears to be a split in the Republican Party.

“They’ll say, ‘look even the Senate Republicans don’t agree with their governor.’ It’s a poor strategic move.”

In the OpEd piece, the eight Republican senators criticizing LePage for making what they describe as demeaning comments about members of the public, and they are urging him to take a more civil tone.

The piece said the senators feel compelled to express their “discomfort and dismay” with the tone of some of LePage’s remarks.

“Were these isolated incidents, we would bite our collective tongues, because we are all human and make mistakes. But, unfortunately, they are not isolated but frequent. Therefore, we feel we must speak out,” the column states.

The piece was written by Sen. Roger Katz of Augusta and Sen. Brian Langley of Ellsworth. Six other senators added their names to the column. They are Sens. Thomas Saviello of Wilton, Chris Rector of Thomaston, Nichi Farnham of Bangor, Earle McCormick of West Gardiner, Roger Sherman of Houlton and Thomas Martin of Benton.

The eight senators received support on Monday from Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster. He noted that the piece was only critical of LePage’s tone, not his policies.

He said the senators are simply representing their districts, and they are hearing concerns from constituents that the lawmakers are being distracted and aren’t focusing on what’s important.

“They won’t want us to spend our time talking about things that don’t matter,” Webster said.

He said many Republican legislators are getting same complaints from constituents and agree with the lawmakers who put their name on the OpEd piece.

“Frankly, it could have been a much larger list,” Webster said.

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