AP Photo Exclusive: GOP campaigns plot revolt against RNC The Sunday evening meeting comes after an eruption of complaints by the candidates about the debates. 
 
 Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee. 
 
 Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks. 
 
 The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates. 
 
 Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 
 
 “I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.” 
 
 Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage. 
 
 Jindal, who polls better in Iowa than he does nationally, has argued that criteria for determining who qualifies for debates should be based on early state polling, not just national surveys. 
 
 “Our continuous complaint is candidate exclusion and the delusional debate polling criteria. It's unacceptable,” said Gail Gitcho, a Jindal spokeswoman. “Maybe this meeting will change that, maybe it won't. But we aren't going to shut up about it.” 
 
 Graham’s campaign has argued that there should be two debates — with two groups of seven or eight candidates selected randomly. 
 
 Carson said on Thursday that he had asked his staff to contact other campaigns to propose format changes, without sharing specifically what he thinks those changes should be. 
 
 “It’s not about me and gotcha questions. It’s about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think,” Carson said before an event at Colorado Christian University. “The whole format was just craziness … You got to be really bad for the whole crowd to boo you." 
 
 "I think the families need to get together here, because these debates as structured by the RNC are not helping the party," Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told the Washington Examiner. "There's not enough time to talk about your plans, there's no presentation. It's just a slugfest. All we do is change moderators. And the trendline is horrific. So I think there needs to be wholesale change here." 
 
 Rubio, largely considered the standout of Wednesday's debate, said the questions from CNBC's moderators "became irritating" as the night wore on. 
 
 "I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. 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." 
 
 "The campaigns are not going to allow the networks to control this process," Huckabee told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Thursday night. 
 
 Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly demanded that the debates last no longer than two hours. On Wednesday night, he even boasted of muscling CNBC into changing the format for the third debate. "Everybody said it was going to be three hours, three-and-a-half, including them, and in about two minutes, I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here," he said. "Not bad." 
 
 Sources at Fox Business Network, the hosts of the next GOP debate on Nov. 10, said that as of Thursday afternoon, they hadn't heard from any campaigns or the RNC about their debate format, but that they weren't concerned. They pointed to positive reviews of the first GOP debate, hosted by Fox News, and noted that though it's Fox Business' first debate, viewers and the candidates can expect the same results next month with moderators Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto. 
 
 Hadas Gold and Eliza Collins contributed to this report. 
 
 ||||| Several Republican presidential campaigns are planning to hold a meeting in Washington, D.C., this Sunday to discuss plans for wresting more control of the debates from the Republican National Committee, CNN has confirmed. 
 
 The meeting, first reported by Politico, comes in the wake of Wednesday's night's CNBC primary debate, which has been widely criticized by the candidates. The RNC has not been invited to the meeting, reflecting the campaigns' frustrations with the committee's handling of the debate process. 
 
 Sources with knowledge of the meeting said the plan came about after a discussion between representatives from the Ben Carson and Bobby Jindal campaigns, who then brought in aides to Donald Trump and Lindsay Graham. 
 
 As of Thursday night, representatives from the Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina and Rick Santorum campaigns are also expected to attend the meeting, which is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Sunday. The Jeb Bush and Rand Paul's campaigns are tentative, while a spokesperson for Chris Christie confirmed that their team was not part of the discussions. 
 
 Related: Seething GOP campaigns escalate the CNBC grievances 
 
 The campaigns' goal: Come up with a way to gain more control over a debate process that they see as unruly and ill-fitted to the interests of the Republican candidates. 
 
 Earlier on Thursday, Carson had told reporters that he would be demanding a new debate format and was reaching out to the other Republican candidates in an attempt to force changes in the next debate. 
 
 ‎"We need a change of format," Carson said during a press conference in Lakewood, Colorado. "Debates are supposed to be to get to know the candidates, what is behind them. What it has turned into is a gotcha." 
 
 Wednesday night's two-hour long debate -- moderated by CNBC's Carl Quintanilla, John Harwood and Becky Quick -- was widely panned by Republican candidates and the RNC, all of whom complained about biased and shallow questions. 
 
 During the debate, Senator Cruz accused the moderators of trying to instigate a cage match. Trump slammed the "ridiculous questions," and Christie grew visibly irate at the moderators' decision to discuss fantasy football instead of other issues. 
 
 "Wait a second, we have $19 trillion in debt, we have people out of work, we have ISIS and al-Qaeda attacking us and we're talking about fantasy football?" Christie shouted. "Can we stop?" 
 
 Related: French media gauled by Jeb Bush's work week diss
– Republican candidates aren't just ticked off about how the debates are being presented, they're planning what Politico refers to as a "revolt" against the networks—and the Republican National Committee. Representatives from most of the campaigns plan to meet Sunday evening to plot strategy on how to gain control of the format. The initiative is spearheaded by the Trump, Carson, Jindal, and Graham campaigns, but representatives from the Rubio, Fiorina, Huckabee, Paul, and Santorum campaigns are on board and plan to attend the meeting, according to Politico. CNN confirms the development, adding that the Bush campaign is a maybe. ‎"We need a change of format," Carson said Thursday. "Debates are supposed to be to get to know the candidates, what is behind them. What it has turned into is a gotcha." In addition to the leading candidates' concerns about format, the Jindal and Graham campaigns are reportedly upset that the networks—with the blessing of the RNC—have been allowed to dictate who gets to share the main stage, relegating them to undercard status. “I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” says Graham's campaign manager. The idea is to “find out what works best for us as a group.”