The first chapter of the Democratic race for president has been defined by its steadiness. A handful of scandals once billed as potentially devastating—shoulder touching! Tupac! Standing on tables!—revealed themselves as little more than Twitter ephemera. The two most famous candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, unsurprisingly remain atop most of the polls. The two candidates who have managed to climb up the ladder, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, have done so by defining a clear rationale for running and pounding their message daily, with a relentless media and travel schedule. The race, though, has remained mostly static, helmed by a pair of durable white-haired front-runners, a platoon of credible second-tier candidates, and a roster of one-percenters who look like they wandered off the set of Frasier.

The most common refrain about this phase in the campaign, from the candidates, campaign flacks, and pundits, is this: “It’s early.” That continues to ring true. A Quinnipiac poll this week showed that 45% of Democrats are paying “a lot” of attention to the campaign. The rest are following the race somewhat, a little bit, or not at all—and even those answers came from the self-selecting type of person who willfully chose to pick up a random call and engage with a stranger over the phone about politics. If you are not that type of person, I would like to hang out with you at a barbecue this summer. Even the two candidates who have managed to wrestle free so far—Warren and Buttigieg—have mostly done so on the backs of college-educated white liberals, the type of voter who would spend their free time following the minutiae of the primary race. Many more primary voters have not yet picked a horse.

Yes, it’s early. But there’s another article of faith inside the campaigns and network greenrooms: that the first primary debates will shake up the race, ushering in a kinetic new phase of candidate-on-candidate warfare, finally bringing some drama and conflict to a race that’s mostly lacked the kind of fireworks the media craves. The debates, hosted by NBC News in Miami over two nights later this month, will feature a randomized draw of 10 candidates on each debate stage. Each debate will last two hours, moderated by a diverse roster of big-name NBC anchors. Campaigns and TV executives are all betting on big ratings. After all, the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 cycle, held in Cleveland and hosted by Fox News, was a ratings behemoth, placing Donald Trump at the center of the debate stage and drawing roughly 24 million viewers. The first Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley was less of a magnet but a draw nonetheless: some 15 million viewers watched CNN that night. Among the campaign managers I’ve spoken with in recent days, the betting line is that 15-20 million viewers will tune in on June 26. “I do think the debates will be well watched among activists and primary voters,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser who is not working for any candidate this cycle. “The crowd has grown so big that there is only so much oxygen in the tank. If you are not on the radar screen going into the debates, or coming out of them, you may be out of this thing.”

What separates this debate cycle from past ones, thanks to the sheer number of the candidates, is the DNC’s lottery-style decision to sprinkle the candidates across two stages on two different nights. It’s a worthy improvement from the Republican debates of 2015, which placed power in the hands of ratings-hungry TV producers who decided to shove the lower-tier candidates table into a series of jayvee debates that aired before prime time. This year the DNC responded admirably to complaints from 2015, when party officials put their thumbs on the debate scale in favor of Hillary Clinton, as leaked emails later revealed. This cycle everyone with a Nordstrom suit gets at least one bite at the national-television apple. But due to the last-minute nature of the debate draw on Friday, candidates will have less than two weeks to prepare for a debate that might only allow 6 to 10 minutes of speaking time per person. The stakes are even higher for lesser-known candidates hoping to make a good first impression. “It’s the first chance to introduce yourself to people who haven’t seen you before,” said a senior official on one Democratic campaign. “It’s a captive audience of people who want to learn more about you. And those people have not heard your stories, your vision, or your message. You have to try to get it across in what little time you have.”