New York Times: “The conclusion of the special counsel’s report that President Trump did not conspire with Russia all but assures that Mr. Trump’s political fate will be determined at the ballot box next year — and that Democratic voters already consumed by electability will become even more singularly focused on finding a candidate who can defeat the president.”

“With House Democrats now far less likely to impeach Mr. Trump, and Senate Republicans certain to resist removing him if they did, the president will be judged in a 2020 race sure to revolve more around his performance in office than how he won in the first place.”

“The 2020 hopefuls may not need much convincing. On the campaign trail, few of the top-tier Democratic candidates spend much time inveighing about Mr. Trump’s links to Russia.”

“President Trump has publicly boasted that he could beat any of his 2020 Democratic challengers. But privately, several members of the Trump campaign see a few who could pose a threat to his re-election, and are in the early stages of building out their strategy for attack,” Axios reports.

“The three candidates that seem to concern the Trump campaign most are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. That’s in no particular order, and you’ll get a different answer depending on who you talk to.”

Charleston Post & Courier: “If a majority of South Carolina’s Democratic Party county chairs had to pick a presidential nominee today, the choice would come down to a two-person duel, not an open scrum.”

“With 11 months to go until the Feb. 29, 2020, primary, U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey are the clear popular nods (not necessarily in that order),”

NBC News: “While Sanders’ allies have worried that O’Rourke could eat into the Vermont senator’s base of young progressives, Biden may end up being the one with the most to lose among mainline Democrats more concerned with electability than political revolution.”

“Instead of shoring up his progressive bona fides in the face of left-flank attacks, O’Rourke has emphasized a Biden-esque message of civility while making a case that he can win the White House by stumping in the very Midwest states that Biden allies argue “Middle-Class Joe” is most capable of carrying.”

A new Fox News poll finds Joe Biden leading the Democratic presidential primary field with 31%, followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders at 23%, Sen. Kamala Harris at 8%, Beto O’Rourke at 8%, Sen. Cory Booker at 4% and Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 4%.

“President Trump is mounting a defense of Rust Belt states that delivered his 2016 victory and will serve as the key to his reelection bid next year,” The Hill reports.

“The president will travel to Michigan next Thursday to stage his first campaign rally since a number of top Democratic contenders jumped into the presidential race, part of what is expected to be an effort to visit battleground states in the months before the general election campaign begins.”

David Nather: “The candidates of the crowded fields in the last few presidential elections — even the also-rans — almost always came out ahead or, at worst, ended up in the same place.”

“Unless they have skeletons in their closet that could be exposed, there’s really no reason for yet another longshot candidate not to give it a chance.”

“I think all of a sudden, the 2020 election went from a slam dunk for Democrats to something where we’re going to have trouble beating this guy because he’s going to make Democratic socialism swing to the left, which I don’t think is real, but he’s going to make it into the issue.”

— Former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell, on CNN.

David Remnick: “The emergency that the Trump Presidency represents leaves the Democratic Party’s cast of candidates with a singular responsibility—to win the election—and two colossal reclamation projects. The first involves the environment. Presidential debates in past elections have largely ignored the costs of climate change. But public opinion on the topic is moving, and there is cause for at least some political optimism in the fact that many Democrats have gotten behind the idea of a New Deal-scale effort to address the issue. Candidates who can best give shape to that impulse and find a plausible way to make it a legislative reality deserve the most urgent attention.”

“The second reclamation concerns Trumpism. Somehow, sometime, Trump will leave the political stage; but the moral and material corruption he has inflicted will be with us for a long while. Who has the vision and the language to confront xenophobia and white-supremacist ideology? Who has the dexterity and the pragmatism to enact reforms on voting rights, health care, immigration, mass incarceration, and campaign finance, and so strengthen a stressed democracy? Who has the political acumen to argue for policies adequate to resolve our crises and, at the same time, to win back the millions of voters who cast a ballot for Barack Obama and then shifted to Trump?”

Texas Tribune: “South Carolina may well have a reputation of fueling political grudges borne out of decades of dirty politics. But when former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke traveled here on Friday and Saturday, the message from the locals could not have been more emphatic: They want to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, and they have no interest in sour grapes from also-rans.”

“It was a message the candidate was already selling.”

“For Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday, it wasn’t quite campaigning as usual after the delivery of a long-awaited report from the special counsel roiled Washington over the weekend. But it was pretty close,” the New York Times reports.

“At events across early primary states, voters asked about health care and school shootings and immigration… Democratic voters said they cared deeply about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election but weren’t quite sure what to make of the latest twist, exactly.”

CBS News: 2020 candidates demand release of Mueller report.