If there is something that unites the nearly two dozen Democrats currently in the field, it is that no one, really, knows how this works. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Trump changed politics in 2016, and that everyone — candidates, operatives and media — is still scrambling to understand the implications of his victory. No doubt, Trump humbled the experts (you’d hope) and blew up notions of how politicians should behave and what voters would allow. He also ushered in a free-for-all mentality that might account in part for the “Why not me?” stampede on the Democratic side, which now includes everyone from Obama’s goofy-uncle V.P. on down to the guy live-streaming his visit to the dentist to the spiritual guru sipping wine in front of me as tiny peeps emanated from a basket of chicks. But focusing too much on Trump misses the full degree to which uncertainty has become the overriding new norm — in American life, not just politics. Our notions have changed about what it means to be viable, familiar and authentic as public actors. Politics is just one arena in which this shift has been playing out.

Up close, the early race for the Democratic nomination can resemble a mass reconnaissance process, with the candidates as advance troops scouting an electorate that their party so badly misunderstood the last time around. How exactly do you run for president in 2019? What are the rules, and what should you say and who is even listening? At their unruly best, campaigns can be sprawling idea labs. You can learn a lot when no one knows anything.

I spent a few weeks trying to divine where exactly this has left the Democrats, both as individual campaigns and as a chaotic body of energized particles. There were big and enthusiastic crowds and campaigns trying to play nice with one another, at least in public (and at least for now). Polls have been mostly steady, with the best-known candidates (Biden, Sanders) at the top, followed by a shifting cast of risers (Warren, Buttigieg, Kamala Harris) and a trailing horde of 1-percenters and vanity candidates bringing up the crowded rear.

Candidates have alternately enjoyed media-darling status or wondered why they weren’t breaking through. They hate it when people ask if they’d want to be someone’s vice president or maybe consider (Hickenlooper, Bullock, O’Rourke) running for Senate back home (Colorado, Montana, Texas) instead of running around telling New Hampshire voters how special they and their silly primary are. But there is far less unity among the various campaigns, and sometimes within the candidates’ own heads, about how they plan to engage with voters and, ultimately, campaign against Trump. Beating him has quite obviously been a preoccupation of Democratic voters since the moment of his election, far beyond the typical level of urgency about defeating the incumbent president from the other party. “Electability” has thus become even more of a watchword than usual, leading to circular takes in which voters tend to channel the last pundit they saw yammering on TV about so-and-so’s fund-raising prowess or admirable message discipline.

I began my tour of the field on a Saturday morning in early May at a farmers’ market in downtown Des Moines, the first of the season. A few candidates were expected to make the rounds here, including Bernie Sanders, who (per Twitter) was given a bag of mesclun by an admirer before he headed north to Ames for a rally at Iowa State University, in the same venue where I watched Elizabeth Warren a day earlier. At first blush, Sanders 2020 looks and sounds quite a bit like the candidate who monkey-wrenched Hillary’s campaign in 2016. In the student center in Ames, they played Tracy Chapman singing about how finally the tables are starting to turn, while Ben Cohen, the wild-haired Ben and Jerry’s guy, introduced the similarly wild-haired Brooklyn-born Vermonter with flavorful assurance. “He’s been in Washington, in the House and in the Senate, for 30 years,” Cohen said. “He understands the cesspool of what is our political system today. And he’s the guy who therefore will be able to flush the crap down the drain.”