MANCHESTER, N.H. — Old but well-known vs. fresh but anonymous: That’s how the 2020 Democratic presidential field is shaping up so far — and it’s causing anxiety within a party starting to acknowledge that President Donald Trump could be harder to beat for reelection than the base would like to admit.

The older generation — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — would be tested and experienced on the national stage, with high name recognition and built-in support. They’d also all be in their 70s, people who’ve been around forever for Trump to use as perfect foils for exactly what he stands against.


Then there’s everyone else looking at a White House run who could embody a new start, separate from the Washington and political establishment that repel voters. But they’re virtually unknown, and they’d be running against the most famous man in the world who’s proved he can dominate every news cycle.

If only, Democrats say, there was some person under 55 who had any profile.

“That person doesn’t exist,” said Howard Dean, the 2004 presidential candidate and former Democratic National Committee chair.

Dean, who’s 68, is clear on which option he wants: “I have nothing against any of the people my age who will run, but I really do believe that if we’re going to appeal to the younger generation, we’ve got to change the party."

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Add that to the long list of existential worries gripping the party, from losing white working-class voters, to not connecting anymore with huge numbers of voters Democrats used to assume were theirs, to seeing Republicans outraise, outmaneuver and outperform them in races that they can’t offer any rational reason for not winning.

“Being able to make that kind of a gut level connection that gets underneath the politics — whether you’re 70 or older, or 35 — is what we need,” said Anson Kaye, a Democratic media consultant who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere, Barack Obama came out of nowhere, Donald Trump came out of nowhere, and my guess is that somebody is going to come out of nowhere for 2020.”

No way, said Bill Burton, a Democratic consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and then in the White House.

“If you look at the nominees for the two major parties going back to JFK, we never just pick somebody who no one has ever heard of,” Burton said. “I don’t think it’s likely that we pick somebody out of thin air to do it.”

Sanders will be here on Labor Day for a series of events, on his first trip back to New Hampshire since last year’s election, when he crushed Clinton in the primary and then came back to campaign for her several times in the fall.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Maryland Rep. John Delaney, two of the people hoping to get voters to pay attention to them, already beat him here.

“If you’re not as well known, you have to work harder to make that connection, but the special thing about our races in our country — I’ve seen it in Iowa, I’ve seen it in New Hampshire — [is the success of] people who a year or two before nobody knew who they were,” Garcetti, 46, said, driving to the airport after a day of introducing himself to people who’d mostly never heard of him. “Of course, there’s an advantage to being well-known. But there’s no real disadvantage to not being as well known.”

Reminded that former Sen. Harry Reid in December compared the Democratic front-runners to “an old folks home,” Garcetti said, “Better that he says it.”

Delaney, who’s running on his success co-founding two companies, talked about it like a business-school case study. “The Democratic Party is a turnaround. Anyone who doesn’t admit that is not looking at the facts,” he said. “Having some new people taking a crack at this, I think, is very valuable.”

“Name ID is a huge advantage, because it costs a lot of money to build name ID. If someone has it, they can save time and money,” Delaney added. But "national name ID is not necessarily what you have to solve for. What you have to solve for is to impress the voters in the key states.”

Trump, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere: He overwhelmed the large Republican field last year, riding on decades of celebrity. Obama was a national political star going into the 2008 campaign, thanks to his 2004 convention speech. Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are the closest examples of vaulting in from nowhere.

Were Biden to run, it would be the sixth presidential election he’d either been in or come close to entering. He served 36 years in the Senate and an additional eight in the Obama administration — not the kind of résumé built for an anti-establishment moment.

But if he’s in, he’d likely be looking to tap into a sense, already building among leading Democrats and Republicans, of needing a steady elder statesman to counteract, in style and substance, Trump's approach to the presidency.

“Joined together, we are more than 300 million strong,” Biden wrote recently in an article for the Atlantic that charred Trump over his response to the neo-Nazi march on Charlottesville and read like a draft stump speech. “Joined together, we will win this battle for our soul.”

And yet, talk to some senior Democrats in Washington about the idea of Biden running at 77 years old, and they offer some variation of how much they love him, but "I hope he doesn't" or "it's not what we need right now."

“If you’re not as well known, you have to work harder to make that connection, but the special thing about our races in our country — I’ve seen it in Iowa, I’ve seen it in New Hampshire — [is the success of] people who a year or two before nobody knew who they were,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. | Jerod Harris/Getty Images

In 2016, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley could never quite answer why he’d backed Clinton in 2008 but was running against her then. With so many candidates mulling bids in 2020, there are risks of that same dynamic.

Take Biden and Garcetti. Two years from now, they could be standing on a debate stage in New Hampshire, going at each other. But in September 2015, at the height of anticipation that he was about to get into the 2016 race, Garcetti hosted the vice president for a small dinner at his home that included Jimmy Kimmel, the former California state treasurer and other potential supporters and donors. Then this past January, in his last political stop in office, Biden appeared at a mayoral reelection campaign fundraiser for Garcetti in Beverly Hills, California.

“I love Joe, and I hope his last chapter isn’t written for this country,” Garcetti said, before deflecting a question about what facing Biden might be like. Garcetti insisted he's not at the stage of conceptualizing a White House run.

But one clear lesson he took from 2016 is that the next presidential campaign is going to be a dogfight, and anyone who gets in will have to consider the real possibility they’d lose to an upstart. No one is getting a cleared field the way Clinton — with the exception of a bid by Sanders that few took seriously at first — did.

“Not only will candidates not stand for it, I think the American people won’t stand for it again,” Garcetti said. “They want options. They don’t want to be told who to vote for."