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In an age of 24-hour cable news channels and year-round fundraising, where social media has seemingly turned half the nation into unpaid pundits and amateur satirists, Americans are no longer afforded a political offseason.

Thus, it would be easy to dismiss the upcoming Republican presidential debate as just the latest contribution to the background noise of the political machinery, a fleeting moment between the Big Thing that happened the other day and the Big Thing that will preoccupy us next week.

With the 2016 election a distant 15 months in our future, we seem unable at this point even to agree on which candidates are and are not “serious.” Given all this, one might reasonably conclude that Thursday’s debate will be forgotten long before Labor Day, much less Super Tuesday (March 1, 2016, for those marking their calendars).

That may turn out to be true. Not all debates grab or hold the public’s attention. Nevertheless, there are several good reasons to believe that this week’s GOP match-up in Cleveland could help to shape the race for months to come.

First, primary election debates differ in significant ways from their more celebrated general election counterparts.   By the time Barack Obama and Mitt Romney squared off in the months leading up to the 2012 election, most Americans had already decided how they would vote; not even the most masterful debate performance would change their minds. Millions of viewers, therefore, simply consumed these debates as entertainment, rooting for their preferred candidate, while remaining impervious to appeals from the other side.

By contrast, very few Republicans have yet selected a clear favorite from among the 16 men and one woman currently vying for the GOP nomination. None of the contenders, even the best known, possesses a distinct political identity in the minds of most voters.

As a result, each of the participants in Thursday’s debate faces the opportunity — and risk — of creating a lasting first impression. An especially strong debate performance could propel a middle-tier candidate to front-runner status. By the same token, a particularly inept showing could reduce that same candidate to an undesired recurring role on Comedy Central or “Saturday Night Live” (think Rick “Oops” Perry in 2012).

Many years ago, long before anyone had heard of the Internet, my colleague, Peter Schrott, and I conducted an experiment to measure the impact of a long-forgotten primary election debate on a roomful of college freshmen. We were stunned by the results.

Exposure to the debate had a profound effect on the students’ attitudes toward the participants, far greater than anything we had seen in our previous studies of general election debates. We concluded that these events had the capacity to make a huge difference in the fortunes of primary election candidates, but only if voters chose to tune in. In those days, audiences for primary debates rarely moved the ratings needle. Viewership has grown in more recent years, but public apathy still largely prevails.

Trump’s fellow candidates may cringe at his rhetorical style, but those who perform well on Thursday should be grateful for the audience that Trump will draw to this otherwise unremarkable event.

Enter Donald Trump. Whatever one thinks of Trump and his multi-decade career as developer, casino magnate, reality show host, and, now, presidential front-runner, his persistent and raucous celebrity has transformed the early months of the 2016 campaign. His presence on the dais this week will almost certainly guarantee that this debate will garner ratings generally reserved for entertainment shows like, well, “The Apprentice.”

His fellow candidates may cringe at his rhetorical style, but those who perform well on Thursday should be grateful for the audience that Trump will draw to this otherwise unremarkable event. (This also raises enormously the stakes of appearing in the evening’s 10-candidate debate, rather than the Trump-free afternoon event to which Fox News will invite those seven hopefuls whose polling numbers fail to place them in the top tier.)

We know from experience that not all announced presidential contenders will make it to the February Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Candidacies flame out for any number of reasons. Funding dries up. Negative press coverage overwhelms them. Campaigns are simply ignored as electorally irrelevant. The winnowing process is perpetual and merciless. With 17 ambitious politicians all seeking the same prize, relatively small slip-ups can prove fatal. This is especially true when they occur in front of a large audience.

In short, despite the fact that it will occur in the summer of 2015, we may look back at Thursday’s Republican presidential debate as a turning point in the longer campaign. That alone makes it compelling viewing. But even those generally apathetic Americans who are simply attracted by the presence of one of recent history’s most unusual celebrity candidates may find themselves learning more than they expected to.