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From the poll:

Ms. Clinton would get 65 percent of Democratic votes compared to 13 percent for Vice President Joe Biden, 4 percent for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and 1 percent or less for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. If Clinton is not in the race, Biden would get 45 percent, with 15 percent for Gov. Cuomo, 6 percent for, Gov. Patrick, 3 percent O'Malley and 2 percent for Warner.

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Tuesday's primary elections set up an eight-week sprint to the June 25 election.

In Markey, the race pits a longtime liberal politician known for environmental advocacy against Gomez, a fresh-faced social moderate with a distinguished biography and untested political skills. On paper, it looks like a competitive contest, but Republicans quietly concede that Markey is the strong favorite in a state where only around 11 percent of voters are registered Republicans.

"As we've shown before in the state, anything can happen in a special election," said Republican strategist Ron Kaufman, Massachusetts' national committeeman.

Indeed, little-known Republican state Sen. Scott Brown stunned Democrats in his 2010 special election U.S. Senate victory in a contest that became a referendum on Obama's healthcare overhaul. So far, at least, this race has drawn little national interest, even before being overshadowed by the Boston Marathon bombings.

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From the New York Times:

He and his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton, disclosed last week that they had a combined income of $496,000 in 2012, most of it from Mr. Weiner’s work. The money provided a lifestyle-changing infusion for the couple, who moved from a modest home in Forest Hills, Queens, to a large apartment on Park Avenue South in Manhattan.

Mr. Weiner’s rapid rise from disgraced lawmaker to in-demand strategic consultant demonstrates the enduring power of Washington’s revolving door.

“I am a good capitalist," he told the Times.

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"I rocked it," Colbert Busch said following Monday's 75-minute debate before an audience of about 500 at The Citadel, which was telecast on C-SPAN. Sanford, a former two-term governor trying to revive a political career damaged by an extramarital affair, said he would let the pundits decide who won.

With Election Day just a week away, both have separate appearances Tuesday, then appear before a Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce group on the city's waterfront before attending a forum sponsored by the Goose Creek NAACP. During both appearances, the candidates will address attendees but won't debate.

They did debate Monday, before a lively audience where supporters frequently broke into shouts or applause.

Early on, Colbert Busch, the sister of political satirist Stephen Colbert, reminded Sanford that he once used taxpayer funds to "leave the country for a personal purpose" - referring to the extramarital affair with an Argentine woman he had while governor. In general, Colbert Busch has refused to bring up Sanford's personal past during the campaign.

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“The only discussions I’m having are about how to help the state, how to get the state running, how to make the government a better government,” he conitnued. “And to the extend I’m focusing on politics, it’s my race next year.”

“I understand the press appeal of presidential politics,” Cuomo added. “But no, I’m doing what I’m doing.”

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From the Post:

“The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.

“He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely,’’ the source continued.

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Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year's heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November's exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.

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“If reporters want to go try to find more, I can’t say that they’re not going to be able to find another picture, or find another person who may want to come out on their own, but I’m not going to contribute to that. The basics of the story are not gonna change,” Weiner said, speaking to RNN-TV’s Dominic Carter.

Weiner has recently been making the media rounds, possibly in the hopes of running for mayor of New York City this year. A recent poll put him in second place behind Christine Quinn in the primary, though trailing 26-15 percent, with 50 percent of Democrats saying they would not vote for him.

Watch:

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The National Journal cites an anonymous senior official in the group, who said senior members of the super PAC met to discuss possible responses to the failure of gun control legislation:

The Bloomberg group is mulling a variety of messages and methods for Arkansas. One approach would be to target reliable Democratic voters, including African Americans, with advertising that calls out Pryor for “opposing the president’s agenda,” the official said. Another would be to expand the campaign to suburban women and other moderates. The campaign might not be limited to the issue of guns.

“Money would not be an object,” the official said, adding that a decision on whether to target Pryor would come soon and that action against other Democrats is still possible.

Pryor is one of the more vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2014.

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He added: "We're going to do our best to get something just as soon as we can. It's really an issue that I feel very strongly about and the American people do also."

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In their desire to find a compromise acceptable to the chronically short-sighted and self-destructive Republican Party, Democrats have crafted an immigration bill that is for the most part as unobjectionable as it is uninspired. The bill cobbles together a series of pragmatic concessions that, while perhaps sufficient to overcome conservative objections, will likely prove wholly insufficient at actually addressing the problem it was designed to solve — that is, fixing our broken immigration system. The tangle of hurdles and exclusions, loopholes for businesses and pitfalls for immigrants, is precisely the mess we should be cleaning up, not making worse.

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Abbott was referring to reports that North Korea had included Austin, Texas on its list of potential targets in the United States. But, Abbott told the Waco Tribune-Herald, the state has more “far more dangerous” problems, in the form of the federal government.

“One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons,” Abbott said. “The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

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"If I run for mayor and if I become the mayor, I want people looking at me and saying, 'You know what, you are in charge, you did this. You are accountable,'" Weiner said.

Louis also had to push Weiner to answer questions about the lewd photos he tweeted out, asking him how many people received the messages. From NY1's transcript of the exchange:

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Obama didn’t talk about it when he first campaigned for the job -- if he had, he surely wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination, and may not even have beaten John McCain, since not even Republican presidential candidates publicly campaign to weaken what their party calls “entitlements.” Everyone sensibly had assumed that no Democrat would want to weaken or reduce the crowning achievements of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, not to mention of the Democratic Party itself. But immediately after getting elected, Barack Obama admitted he wanted to do just that.

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Weiner, who resigned from the House in 2011 after he accidentally tweeted a lewd picture of himself and then lied to the press about it, told the Times that he has spent $100,000 in polling and research for a possible run in 2013. “I don’t have this burning, overriding desire to go out and run for office,” he said. “It’s not the single animating force in my life as it was for quite some time. But I do recognize, to some degree, it’s now or maybe never for me, in terms of running for something."

“Also, I want to ask people to give me a second chance," he continued. "I do want to have that conversation with people whom I let down and with people who put their faith in me and who wanted to support me. I think to some degree I do want to say to them, ‘Give me another chance.’”

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And while it's still just a few months in, a look at these important but overshadowed goals, as he outlines his budget, does not suggest much progress -- or urgency.

“I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago,” Obama thundered in the February speech, in an aggressive plea to address the crisis. “But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future.”

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Buono, a state senator, has had a tough time gaining any momentum in the race, with Christie enjoying overwhelming popularity that has sustained since Hurricane Sandy. But gay rights pose a tricky problem for the Republican governor. For example, Christie had to scramble to clarify his opposition to gay conversion therapy after commenting that “I’m of two minds just on this stuff in general." Buono called the remark "disgusting," while the DGA fundraised off of it.

From the Star-Ledger:

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Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline.  And there’s good reason to put pressure on.  After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

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If Democrats and Republicans were the true divide, the meager gun control measures recently introduced in the Senate would have the majority needed to pass. After all, there are 53 Democratic Senators (and two Independents who generally side with them). Moreover, this time, the threat of a GOP filibuster is not to blame. Yet the Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, removed the assault weapons ban from the draft bill because some 15 Democratic senators, in effect, supported the conservative pro-gun position, making up — with the Republican senators — that majority “conservative party.” Thanks to this party, the same legislative defeat is about to befall liberal proposals to curtail high-capacity magazines. This leaves only better background checks on the table, but these, too, will inevitably be rendered ineffective by the conservatives via the underhanded gutting of enforcement (more about this shortly).

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