Advisers for at least four Republican campaigns will gather in the nation's capital on Sunday to discuss how the next debates should be structured, while taking the power for them out of the hands of television networks and the Republican National Committee.
The campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal, and Lindsey Graham are organizing the event, reports
Politico, and the RNC has not been invited.
The campaigns say representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Rick Santorum are expected to attend and planners are reaching out to the other Republican candidates.
"I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves," Christian Ferry, Graham's campaign manager, told Politico, to "find out what works best for us as a group."
Graham himself favors dividing the remaining candidates into two groups and picking randomly who will appear on the main stage, which would give lower-polling candidates such as himself an opportunity to have their platforms heard nationally.
Paul and Jeb Bush, meanwhile, have complained that the candidates are not getting equal speaking time in the debates, and others want to be allowed to give opening and closing statements, which the networks say will take time away from the debates themselves.
"Our continuous complaint is candidate exclusion and the delusional debate polling criteria. It's unacceptable," said Jindal spokeswoman Gail Gitcho. "Maybe this meeting will change that, maybe it won't. But we aren't going to shut up about it."
Carson complained on Thursday, a day after the CNBC debate, that such events should not be about "gotcha questions. It's about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think."
On Thursday,
Rubio told Fox News that the moderators and their questions became "irritating."
"Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said. "And then, you got questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about us and then get us to react."
And Trump, as the front-runner, is demanding that the debates be no longer than two hours, commenting on Wednesday night that he "renegotiated" CNBC's initial plans for a much-longer event.
The next debate will be at Fox Business Network on Nov. 10, and sources there said they have not heard from the campaigns, but believe their event will meet positive reviews, much like the first Fox News debate held earlier this year.
However, even that debate netted complaints of unfair treatment from Trump, sparking an ongoing feud between him and Fox News star
Megyn Kelly, one of the debate's moderators, after Trump took offense at the tone of her questions.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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