NBC News has announced the official lineup for its upcoming Democratic debates, and it could be a make-or-break moment for the clown car of 2020 candidates hoping to break out in a crowded field. The randomly-selected line-up will pit front-runner Joe Biden against Senator Bernie Sanders and other second-tier candidates like Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Kamala Harris, while Senator Elizabeth Warren, who's been steadily rising toward the top of the field, will go up against a collection of politicians who are all trailing her in the polls.

Per NBC, the candidates for the first debate on Wednesday, June 26, will be Warren, Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, former congress members John Delaney and Beto O'Rourke, Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Ryan, former Housing Secretary Julián Castro, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Gov. Jay Inslee. Debating the next night on Thursday, June 27 are Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, Senator Michael Bennet, author and spiritualist Marianne Williamson, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and Gov. John Hickenlooper. Candidates including Steve Bullock, Rep. Seth Moulton, Mayor Wayne Messam, and former senator Mike Gravel did not meet the polling or fundraising thresholds to qualify for the debate.

The debate line-up was selected via a random process by NBC News as overseen by the Democratic National Committee. Candidates were divided into two groups—based on whether their polling average was above or below 2%—and officials pulled names on paper slips from two boxes to determine the groupings. Per Buzzfeed News, NBC executives then discussed in private which group would go first and decided on putting Warren's group first to “maximize viewership.” The move reportedly caught the D.N.C., which had been hoping for “more randomization of the process,” off-guard. “This is something that was sprung on everyone,” one campaign official told Buzzfeed. The random selection system is new for the D.N.C., which overhauled its debate process after its primary debates for the 2016 election were found to have unfairly favored Hillary Clinton.

The resulting random grouping seems to offer both positives and negatives for many of the candidates. The candidate most clearly affected by the random selection is undoubtedly Warren, who will miss out on facing off against the candidates she's actually going head-to-head with in the polls. Yet the structure could also be a boon for the Massachusetts senator, as she'll be her night's star candidate and have more chances to grab attention, while direct competitors like Buttigieg and Harris will get the ratings benefit of sharing a stage with Biden—and the chance to go after him directly—but will probably have to fight harder for their own moments to shine. “I’m looking forward to the first debate of the Democratic presidential primary on Wednesday, June 26 on [NBC News] and having an opportunity to discuss my plans for big, structural change in this country,” Warren said on Twitter Friday in response to the line-up.

Beyond the field's current top five, third-tier candidates like O'Rourke and Booker are likely to benefit from being on a night that's not dominated by the race's biggest names, giving them a bigger relative standing when compared with less-popular candidates like Gabbard and Inslee. Candidates toward the bottom of the pack on night two, like Swalwell, Williamson, and Hickenlooper, will probably be helped by the visibility boost of being in Biden's group, though they may get drowned out by the race's “star” candidates. So far, those lower-tier candidates seem to be happy about where they've been placed: Hickenlooper said on Twitter he's “excited to be on stage with these leaders” and suggested he'll continue his criticism of Sanders and Democratic Socialism, while Yang simply tweeted, “My dreams are coming true.”