Democrat McAuliffe is up 6 over Cucinelli in race for VA Governor, according to Quinnipiac University poll, report Laura Vozzella and Scott Clement at WaPo. “Among likely voters surveyed by Quinnipiac, Democrats outnumber Republicans 39 percent to 32 percent — the identical split found in Virginia exit polls in the 2012 presidential election.”
At Wonkblog Sarah Kliff has an ironic revelation: “A new poll finds that young Republicans are more likely to have health coverage through their parents’ policy than young Democrats, an option widely expanded under the Affordable Care Act…The poll comes from the Commonwealth Foundation, which has spent two years tracking how adults between the ages of 19 and 25 are reacting to the Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2010, the health care law allowed young adults up to age 26 to stay covered under their parents’ health plans…The Commonwealth Foundation estimates that of the 15 million young adults that have insurance coverage through a parent, 7.8 million would not have qualified without this policy.”
GOP lunacy hits overdrive, as Michael Tomasky reports in his Daily Beast post, “Republicans Move to the Center? Nope, They’re Crazier Than Ever.”
Republicans have launched a total war on student voting in North Carolina, Ari Berman reports at The Nation. Here’s a good video clip on the topic, via berman, from The Rachel Maddow Show, which also spotlights an 80-year-old progressive warrior, who is fighting Republican disenfranchisement of strudents and minorities in NC:

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Republicans have done eveything they can to rig elections in NC, but they still may not be able to take away Kay Hagan’s Senate Seat, as Sean Sullivan explains at The Fix. Imnagine what shape they would be in without the gerrymandering and voter suppression.
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. has a moving meditation on the 50th anniversary of MLK’s dream, which will be commemorated world-wide next week. As Dionne concludes, “We honor him best by sharing not only his hope but also his impatience and his resolve.”
At The Guardian, Vad Badham has an interesting and amusing post on Australia’s experience with compulsory voting, and why it might be a good thing for the U.S.
From Casey A. Klofstad’s “Talking About Politics Boosts Civic Participation“, via the Scholars Strategy Network and Demos: “My basic research finding is quite striking: students who were assigned to dorms in 2003 where they were exposed to political discussion by their randomly assigned roommate became more likely to join civic-minded student organizations such as student government, partisan political organizations, and community volunteer organizations. This effect lasted throughout their four years of college. More recently, I surveyed these same individuals during the 2012 election, and my newly collected data reveal that study participants who were exposed to political discussion as first-year college students are still more likely to be active civically nearly ten years later.”
Kevin Mahnken’s New Republic post, “Two GOP Operatives Reveal How to Turn Texas Blue” notes : “Local exigencies–finding those 250 county chairs and grooming the next Democratic railroad commissioner–are key in any state, but national trends (the Hispanic or Latino population grew by 43 percent over the last decade) and the sputtering of immigration reform are seen as potentially game-changing phenomena in Texas. Weaver [John Weaver of the McCain campaigns] advised Democrats to focus not merely to focus on Latinos, but also the newly minted Texans who relocate to the state for jobs and low cost of living. “People who are moving here from the West Coast, or the upper Midwest, or the East Coast, for economic reasons, they aren’t typical Southern Republicans either,” he said. “Those people are more moderate on social issues, and they see a [Republican] party that’s out of step with their values. Whether it’s a tsunami or not–for Republicans, you can still drown in it if you don’t fix it.”
New GOP scam: highlight diversity, even though they don’t have the numbers to back it up. Or as Nicole Greenstein puts it in her Time Swampland post “The Party of Old White Guys Changes Its Look.”