Carly Fiorina is on the clock, a nine-week clock to be exact. That is when the first Republican debate of the 2016 election will happen. And if she does not get her poll numbers up, she will not make the cut.

“I need your help to get on that debate stage,” Ms. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, wrote in an urgent plea to supporters the other day. “I need to grow my team of supporters.”

Rick Santorum, the former senator and two-time presidential candidate, also might find himself excluded. “If you’re a United States senator, if you’re a governor, if you’re a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company,” he vented to reporters recently, “then you should have a right to be on stage.”

The announcements by Fox News and CNN that they will limit the first two major debates to candidates who rank in the top 10 in national polls has given the Republican Party a “Hunger Games”-type feel. Facing the possibility of being excluded from the first nationally televised face-offs of the 2016 election — and deprived of the priceless media attention the events can generate — some of the lesser-known candidates are under tremendous pressure to raise their visibility.