HARRISBURG -- Leaders of the Republican State Committee this weekend struggled to bind the wounds of a fratricidal primary and ease the concerns of a conservative base skeptical of the party's direction.

During a crisply choreographed meeting yesterday, committee members ratified the choice of the party's elected leaders by making Cambria County's Robert Gleason the new state chairman.

The unanimous choice was part of a show of amity that the party sought to project throughout the weekend. But other evidence during the meeting and in the preceding weeks suggested that the usually disciplined party's goal of a unified, energized march to November faces significant hurdles.

Yesterday's calls for unity were interspersed with references to the intra-party tension that led to the defeat of 13 GOP incumbents in the legislative primaries May 16.

"The last 18 months has not been the best of times for Republicans,'' noted Eileen Melvin, the outgoing chair.

With a clear reference to issues such as last year's controversial, quickly reversed state legislative pay raise, she drew one of the day's loudest rounds of applause when she said, "We have some great elected officials, we have wonderful grass-roots workers, but sometimes our elected leaders make policy decisions without party input and our workers feel like they just carry the bucket for the elephants."

Several of the regional caucuses, meeting before the general session of the committee, approved resolutions protesting the state committee's pre-primary decisions to give extensive financial support to legislative incumbents challenged by other Republicans.

Accepting his new post, Mr. Gleason acknowledged the recent setbacks, but was defiant in pledging to overcome them.

While noting the incumbent ousters and President Bush's dismal poll numbers, he put much of the blame on the news media. "The media works against us constantly, in fact they think they have already written our epitaph," he said.

Nonetheless, he vowed to defy the polls and help the party produce victories for Sen. Rick Santorum and Lynn Swann, the GOP nominee for governor, in November.

For most of the past decade, the Republican organization had been an effective force. Before Gov. Ed Rendell captured the governor's office in 2002, the Republicans controlled every branch of state government.

But with last month's election a fresh and, for some in the party's hierarchy, a painful memory, committee members headed home yesterday after a primary season that brought the party's internal divisions into sharp relief. Those fissures reflect shifts in the bedrock of a party once viewed as a last bastion of moderate Republicanism, exemplified by figures such as the late Sen. John Heinz, former Gov. Tom Ridge and Sen. Arlen Specter.

When he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994, Rick Santorum seemed an anomaly among statewide Republicans in his unapologetic conservatism. Now he is the target of scattered but persistent brickbats from the newly energized right wing of the party, a bloc that he has nurtured throughout his career.

Mr. Santorum, in the eyes of many of his ideological allies in the state party, tarnished his conservative credentials with his support of Mr. Specter against a 2004 primary challenge from former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey. Mr. Toomey supports Mr. Santorum in this race, but many of Mr. Toomey's supporters still resent his actions in 2004.

"His support of Specter over Toomey made no sense from an ideological point of view," said Andy Dlinn, the organizer of the Republican Assembly, a newer group of conservative activists that bills itself as "the Republican wing of the Republican Party."

Mr. Dlinn emphasizes that he supports Mr. Santorum but warns, "The appeal of Toomey was so powerful in the base that I've heard some say they would vote for the other guy just to teach him a lesson."

The Republican Assembly is one of several newer conservative groups -- two others are the Pennsylvania Club for Growth and the Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania -- that supported party insurgents who ousted GOP legislative incumbents last month. Among those who lost were the two top Republicans in the state Senate, President Pro Tem Robert Jubelirer of Altoona and Majority Leader David Brightbill of Lebanon.

Mr. Toomey, a budget hawk who now leads the Washington-based Club for Growth, campaigned against those incumbents. He has argued that the pay raise was not the central issue, but a catalyst reminding conservatives of incumbents' lapses on a number of things, including multiple tax increases and enactment of budgets that raised the cost of government.

Mr. Swann, although opposing the pay raise, risked collateral damage from the party unrest in campaigning for Mr. Jubelirer on the eve of his startling defeat.

Campaigning with Mr. Swann last week, former Gov. Tom Ridge presaged the calls for unity that echoed through the weekend's GOP gathering.

"There is one true conservative in this race, and it's the Republican," Mr. Ridge said of the match-up against the Democratic incumbent. "So whatever disagreements, if they have any, with Lynn, or if they have any uncertainty about his campaign, they ought to join hands with us and try to do their very best to get him elected."

In an interview in Pittsburgh last week, Mr. Santorum dismissed a question on the likely enthusiasm of the party's conservative base.

"Trust me, we're going to make sure the base is mobilized,'' he said. "They're going to know what I stand for -- that's what a campaign is all about.''

Mr. Swann acknowledged the contentious voices in the party but denied that they were evidence of potential weakness.

"I think debate is healthy from a variety of points of view," Mr. Swann said during his campaign swing with Mr. Ridge, who also is the former U.S. Homeland Security secretary. "I don't think it means the party's in disarray; it means that you have people who have concerns about a variety of issues. They can discuss them, but the party can still be together behind their slate of candidates and move forward."

Overlapping the ideological divisions that have flared within the party in general is the post-primary tumult within the two Republican caucuses in the Legislature. The Brightbill and Jubelirer defeats set the stage for leadership elections in the Senate, creating a hidden agenda for some party officials. And some lawmakers in both chambers, and in both parties for that matter, remain upset with their leaders for taking them down the pay raise path last summer.

Beyond those Pennsylvania-specific factors, Republican incumbents across the country are concerned about rumblings of disenchantment within their rank-and-file. A Gallup/USA Today poll published last month showed President Bush's approval rating among Republicans at 68 percent, a figure, the newspaper noted, that was down from 85 percent earlier in the year.

A Rasmussen Reports poll of Pennsylvania voters published last week suggested similar concerns for Mr. Santorum, who had the support of 67 percent of Republicans. His challenger, state Treasurer Bob Casey, on the other hand, had the support of 87 percent of Democratic voters.

Mr. Swann, who was flirting with the margin of error in survey match-ups with Gov. Ed Rendell earlier in the year, also has suffered an erosion in his poll numbers in recent weeks.

James Matthews, the Montgomery County commissioner who is Mr. Swann's running mate, offered one optimistic note to the GOP partisans as he reported that the campaign's fund-raising, which has lagged far behind that of Mr. Rendell, had improved to the point that they have moved up the target date for running televisions ads to the third week of August. Previously, Mr. Swann had said not to expect a major television presence until the fall. Mr. Rendell's campaign has been on the air statewide since last month.