A top aide to Carly Fiorina is criticizing the push by the majority of GOP presidential candidates to negotiate their own debate criteria.
Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, registered the campaign’s disagreement in a letter sent Monday night to Ben Ginsberg, the Republican lawyer working with the campaigns in compiling a list of demands.
{mosads}Fiorina’s campaign was the only one to not send a representative to a Sunday meeting that sought to rally GOP candidates around a single position on the debates.
“We had dinner at the Applebee’s in Pella, Iowa instead,” she noted in a letter obtained by The Hill.
Isgur Flores said Fiorina’s campaign has always been open with its criticisms of the debates.
Earlier this year, it criticized CNN for debate criteria that might have kept Fiorina off the main stage. The criteria was later changed and Fiorina was on the main stage for the CNN debate.
“We have consistently and successfully discussed our concerns with the networks and the voters — and not behind closed doors like the political class seems to like to do. We encourage each of the campaigns addressed here to do the same,” the letter said.
It brushes aside some of the proposed demands from other campaigns, including a specific 67 degree temperature in the debate hall.
The move comes just hours after Donald Trump’s campaign roiled the unified front and decided it would engage in direct negotiations with CNN, which is hosting the GOP’s December 15 debate.