A new Daily Beast/Ipsos poll finds 20% of Democratic and independent men who responded to the survey said they agreed with the sentiment that women are “less effective in politics than men.”

And while 74% of respondents claimed they were personally comfortable with a female president, only 33% believed their neighbors would be comfortable with a woman in the Oval Office.

DNC Chair Tom Perez is defending the strict qualifications for the second round of primary debates in September: meeting the thresholds to qualify is an “opportunity” for candidates to expand their fundraising and name recognition, he told CBS News.

Said Perez: “If you can’t run an effective grassroots campaign in the year 2020, in today’s era, you’re not going to be able to win the presidency,” Perez said. “And what our dual threshold has done is to give additional opportunity to the candidates.”

Politico: “For years, a growing stripe of Democrats has argued that what their party needs is a leader willing to shatter old assumptions, a radical disrupter.”

“Well, Democrats already have found their transformational figure for the 2020 campaign. His name is Donald Trump.”

“No one could miss the obvious ways this president—despite his deviations from traditional conservative orthodoxy—has turned the Republican Party into the pro-Trump party. It could be easy to miss, however, some of the less-obvious ways Trump also has made himself the defining force of the anti-Trump party.”

Rahm Emanuel: “Normally, a scandal centered on how rich parents used bribes to win their children’s admittance into elite colleges wouldn’t play so heavily in the national news. No one much cared when Donald Trump promised large donations as his children enrolled at Penn. But the outrage over the Varsity Blues investigation perfectly illustrates what may be the most important, least understood and underappreciated political dynamic of our era: a full-on middle class revolt against the elites and the privileges they horde. For all the focus on inequality and social justice, this middle-class revolt is the most important barrier standing between Democrats and the White House. They can’t afford to ignore it.”

“Think of what’s happened over the last decade and a half. America endured a war sold on false premises, a bailout of bankers issuing entirely toxic debt, and a massive public effort to prop up auto executives who were building cars that weren’t selling. Is it any wonder so many middle-class taxpayers resent the elites? They’ve been forced to bail them out from their own mistakes time and time again—and yet the beneficiaries of that goodwill haven’t apologized, let alone taken responsibility. America’s middle class is Cinderella and the nation’s elites are her evil stepsisters—only now, it’s the stepsisters who get to marry the prince. It’s infuriating.”

“Ever since the disaster of the 2016 election, Democrats have engaged in (an often pointless) debate about whether President Trump’s supporters were drawn to him on account of economic or cultural grievances. Yes, Hillary Clinton drew more votes, but she was 1,000 times more qualified, and 10,000 times more personally appealing. She should have demolished him—but something drew many voters to Trump, instead.”

“With grisly claims that Democrats promote ‘birth day abortions’ and are ‘the party of death,’ the Republican Party and its conservative allies have aggressively reset the terms of one of the country’s most divisive and emotionally fraught debates, forcing Democrats to reassess how they should respond to attacks that portray the entire party as extremist on abortion,” the New York Times reports.

“The unusually forceful, carefully coordinated campaign has created challenges that Democrats did not expect as they struggle to combat misinformation and thwart further efforts to undercut access to abortion. And advocates of abortion rights fear it is succeeding in pressuring lawmakers in more conservative states to pass severe new restrictions, as Alabama did this week by approving a bill that would essentially outlaw the procedure.”

“Beto O’Rourke on Friday refused to commit his unconditional support to Democrats down the ticket in 2020 should he secure his party’s nomination, in a contentious exchange with a New Hampshire voter,” CNN reports.

Said O’Rourke: “I can’t take a pledge to support every single Democrat in the country. I need to know about them first, right? Would you want me to make a blanket commitment about people I know nothing about, who I’ve never met?”

Ezra Klein: ‘The Democratic Party has lots of policy ideas. But policymaking is downstream from power. The kinds of policies that get crafted, considered, and passed, reflect the balance of power in society. And for all the clarity and rigor Democrats bring to the policy debate, they don’t have a clear theory of power — who they think holds it, and what, if anything, they want to do about it.”

The Atlantic: “The youths in the Democratic Party are angry. Sixty-eight chapters of the College Democrats are urging voters not to donate to the party’s congressional-campaign arm after it instituted a new policy to protect incumbents from primary challenges.”

“A group of Democratic operatives are launching a $60 million political group with plans to reclaim values-laden terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ for their party ahead of the 2020 election,” Politico reports.

“The nonprofit organization, called Future Majority, plans to provide strategic advice to other Democratic groups, as well as branding efforts, communications and a ‘war room’ that will debunk fake news and counter conservative social media. The group quietly soft-launched during the 2018 midterms and advised organizations including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on how to message to voters.”

Eugene Robinson: “The political case for moving deliberately but fearlessly toward impeachment is even clearer: If timorous Democrats do not seize and define this moment, Trump surely will.”

“The conventional wisdom is that Republicans made a political error by impeaching Clinton. But they did win the White House in 2000 and go on to dominate Congress for most of President George W. Bush’s tenure. If impeachment was a mistake, it wasn’t a very costly one. Does it ‘play into Trump’s hands’ to speak of impeachment? I think it plays into the president’s hands to disappoint the Democratic base and come across as weak and frightened. Voters who saw the need to hold Trump accountable decided to give Democrats some power — and now expect them to use it.”

“The head of the DNC pledged the committee wouldn’t use hacked emails or stolen data for political gain ahead of the 2020 presidential election and pressed his RNC counterpart to make the same commitment,” Politico reports.