Peter Hamby: “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.”

“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.”

“Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the last century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history,” The Atlantic reports.

“But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election.”

Matt Bai: “With all the silly handicapping and fantasy baseballing that contaminates our politics now, you would think the last thing you’d want, if you were trying to do something as important as choosing the next president, would be to create a situation where the fate of serious politicians who have yet to be heard hinges entirely on whether their national polling average is nine-tenths of a percent or just over 1 percent.”

“But then, you’re not running the Democratic Party. So you wouldn’t understand.”

First Read: “What’s stunning about President Trump’s admission that he’d accept dirt from a foreign government to help him win an election is not that he said it. After all, we already know that he and those around him asked for — and accepted — that help in 2016.”

“What’s stunning is that everyone should now know that the sitting president of the United States cannot ensure a fair election in 2020.”

“You cannot go back to the end of the Obama administration and think that that’s good enough… We had real problems before Donald Trump became president. We cannot return to the past.”

— Beto O’Rourke, in an interview on Morning Joe, arguing that Joe Biden is “a return to the past.”