(Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Candidate Fiorina says she shouldn’t have to sit at the kids’ table any longer.

Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign is weighing in for the first time on CNN’s criteria for including candidates in the second presidential debate — slamming the network for its reliance on old polls, blasting the “political establishment,” and calling on the Republican National Committee to intervene on the campaign’s behalf.

In a memo set to be released on Wednesday morning, an advance copy of which was obtained by National Review, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, Sarah Isgur Flores, hammers the network for its reliance on polling conducted prior to the first debate, in which she is widely perceived to have dominated the “undercard” event.


“It’s a simple question: Will we have a fair debate process or will the political establishment keep ignoring grassroots Republicans?” she asks.

CNN plans to use an average of polls conducted between July 16 and September 12 to cement its top-ten lineup for the main stage. But only three polls have been released since the Fox News debate on August 6 — a marked contrast to the flood of surveys leading up to the event. This means that Fiorina’s weak pre-debate polling, with numbers hovering around 1 percent, are likely to outweigh the surge that followed her standout performance on the undercard stage.

Flores notes that in the three national polls released since the debate, Fiorina has ranked between fourth and seventh place, and that her name ID and net favorability have risen by double digits. Those polls have put her ahead of candidates who made it on the main stage in the last debate, including John Kasich and Marco Rubio.



The Fiorina campaign is calling on the RNC to take action and ask CNN to weigh the group of all polls conducted in July the same as the group conducted in August and September, after the Fox News debate. “Because there were nine polls released in the three weeks before the last debate, one would expect 18 polls released in the six weeks between the two debates,” Flores writes. “If that does not happen, the polling average of those six weeks should be treated as the equivalent of 18 polls. Assuming the numbers remain consistent with current polling, Carly would easily place in the top 10 for the main debate.”

In order to do that, Fiorina would have to remain at 5 percent in a total of nine polls between now and the CNN debate, according to the website FiveThirtyEight. But with twelve of the 14 polling firms included in CNN’s average operating on undisclosed schedules, it’s unclear whether Fiorina will see the saturation of polls she needs before the cutoff.


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That Fiorina may not debate alongside other top-tier candidates whose numbers have barely changed since the Fox debate is an affront to voters, says Katie Hughes, communications director for CARLY for America.

“No one is campaigning nationally. Placing so much importance on national polling, especially this early in the process, starts to take away the vital role that the voters of these early states play,” Hughes says. “We have seen that the more people learn about Carly’s leadership experience, the more they want her in the White House.”

Read the full contents of the Fiorina campaign’s memo below: