As of this morning, 10 of the roughly two dozen Democratic hopefuls have secured spots by receiving donations from at least 130,000 individual contributors and registering 2 percent support or higher in four qualifying polls. The billionaire Tom Steyer is close to the marker, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has bought more than $1 million in television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire as part of an aggressive late push to get her to 2 percent in the three additional polls she needs to qualify. (She said this week she has just over 110,000 donors, putting her within reach of that threshold.)

But with a week to go before the deadline, a handful of campaigns have all but conceded they aren’t going to make it, and some have directed their ire on the Democratic National Committee instead.

“The DNC leadership in Washington has taken unprecedented steps to intervene in a nomination process that should belong to Democratic voters and caucus-goers,” Craig Hughes, a senior adviser to Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, says. Bennet is among the candidates who participated in the first two debates and is likely to fall short of the threshold for the third. “By limiting participation in the debates through arbitrary rules developed in secret without consultation with state party chairs, activists, or actual DNC members, a few operatives in Washington went into a backroom to put a thumb on the scale on behalf of perceived frontrunners, celebrities, and billionaires who can buy their way in.”

Hughes says that the DNC’s effort to narrow the field this fall “could leave us weaker, not stronger, in the general election” as the party tries to defeat President Donald Trump. Lagging Democratic campaigns have been battering the party committee for months over its decision to add a donor requirement and to nearly double the threshold it created for the first two debates this summer. But those critiques are getting sharper as candidates confront the likelihood that their exclusion from the debate could leave them without any real shot at momentum ahead of the first contests in February.

Already two candidates who appeared in the initial debates have dropped out: Representative Eric Swalwell of California and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who announced last week he would consider a run for Senate instead. Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Mayor Wayne Messam of Miramar, Florida, have not made any of the debates but have continued their campaigns anyway.

And as The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported last week, some of the long-shot candidates are particularly incensed that Steyer, the wealthy liberal activist and impeachment agitator, was able to so easily reach the donor threshold by pouring millions into ads and the purchase of voter files from his own outside organizations. By contrast, candidates without that access to personal wealth have had to devote their resources to Facebook and other online ads designed to raise small-dollar donations solely to gain entry to the debates.