Surveying the landscape on which the Democrats are going to try to best him next year, Donald Trump said this: “It’s a very unexciting group of people.”

If you’re a Democrat and want to beat him next year, you’d better hope the two nights of debates this week prove Trump wrong.

These debates are more important than they appear. Views of the value of these candidacies are beginning to harden. Forget the idea that it’s early and that Bill Clinton hadn’t even declared for the presidency at this point in the 1992 contest: This race has been going on for six months now. At some point, a cultivated flower has to bloom or it will be clear it’s been dead all along.

The only way these debates will matter is if they are exciting. And the only way to ensure that people keep watching them as the months pass, and thereby create a sense that the Democratic Party is full of life, is if these first debates reward their interest with fireworks.

It’s the shmendricks who need to set the debate hall on fire — you know, the ones you’ve never heard of, like the governors of Climatechangiana and Potsmokia and the House members from Whereverdude and Freestuffistan.

Phil Hockenbooper and Joy Inwood, or whatever their names are, are going to need to start screaming and yelling and calling other people names on the stage if they don’t want to return immediately to the national obscurity from which they are attempting to ascend with their unlikely bids for the Democratic nomination.

Here’s how you know I’m right: Democratic grandees fear this is going to happen.

“I’m worried it’s going to be a scrum — a lot of people trying to score points on each other … That circular firing squad is not going to help save our democracy or help working families.” These are the words of Randi Weingarten, who spends every day figuring out new ways to protect bad educators at the expense of children as the head of the American Federation of Teachers.

There’s more hot air in that quote than there was in the Hindenburg. These debates aren’t about saving our democracy or helping working families. They’re about the people on stage trying to become president.

If these candidates listen to their party’s leading drips and intone clichés rather than try to grab the attention of the Democratic electorate, they will deserve the humiliation their failed bids will provide them.

Right now, there are four people who have connected with primary voters thus far: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. And that’s the way it’s going to stay if other people don’t do something dramatic.

For example: Bill de Blasio all but called Joe Biden a racist last week. Let’s see him do it in front of a national audience! I don’t think it would play well, but what does he have to lose? He made the bizarre decision to get into this race in the first place.

You can’t make your mark in this situation, where you’ll have maybe 4 minutes to make your case, by being earnest. Candidates like Cory Booker have earnestness as part of their brand. But earnestness is deadly in one of these multi-candidate clown shows. In 2015, Republicans facing Donald Trump thought he would blow himself up in the debates and so they tried to place themselves in a morally superior position.

That worked well.

If the Democratic aspirants don’t go for broke, they’ll be broke, or broken, in short order.