While 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls can rejoice in having qualified for their race’s first debate, one of them is acknowledging it could be tough to stand out on a crowded stage.

“I tell people, ‘You better not blink, because it’s going to go by so fast,'” said U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, speaking on Wednesday morning at Washington’s Reagan National Airport before boarding a flight to Miami, the host city for the debate.

Political strategists have emphasized that each hopeful may get only get a precious few minutes of airtime at the two-part debate, which featured 10 candidates for two hours on Wednesday night, showcase another 10 for two hours on Thursday night — including Bennet and Colorado rival John Hickenlooper — and leave out five other candidates.

Regarding how he’ll ensure he’s visible on stage on Thursday night, Bennet said: “We’ll just have to see. I hope everybody’s visible. I hope what will happen is a robust conversation on the stage. We’re having in the Democratic Party a very vigorous competition of ideas, and I think that’s good for the country.”

Bennet said his key point at the debate will have to do with the economy, as he spoke about how Democrats can frame the economy in a way that wins them the White House.

“We need to have an economy that actually works for everybody,” he told MarketWatch. “My state, Colorado, has one of the best economies on the planet. But most of the people I meet can’t afford some combination of housing, health care, higher education or early childhood education – can’t afford the building blocks of a middle-class life – and that’s the result of 40 years of very little economic mobility for the bottom 90% of Americans. Over and over and over again during these recoveries, you see the benefit of the recovery accruing to the people at the very top of the economy, and nobody else is benefiting. That’s something we have to change.”

How do you make that change?

“There’s a lot of things we can do. When I think about the way we’ve spent our money since 2001, that’s one thing we wouldn’t want to repeat,” he said. “We’ve spent $5 trillion on tax cuts, most of which have accrued to the wealthiest people in America, which has only increased our income inequality, rather than diminishing it. We didn’t have to do that. We spent $5.6 trillion in the Middle East, so that’s $12 trillion or $13 trillion that – from the point of view of actually lifting the boats of people in America – we might as well have lit on fire. That’s just a starting point.”

Bennet also called for investing in “infrastructure, in R&D, in education. Our education system today is reinforcing the income inequality that we have instead of liberating people from it. That’s something that we could work on.”

“So I think the American people are looking at themselves and saying, ‘We’ve suffered with this economy a long time, we’re unable to live a middle class life, and if we’re born into poverty, our chances of escaping it are very remote. And Washington hasn’t done anything about it.’ And they’re right about that.”

Bennet, who sat Wednesday in coach on an American Airlines flight to Miami, is far behind Democratic front-runner Joe Biden in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls, with the former vice president getting support of 32% vs. the Colorado senator’s 0.4%.