Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) announced plans to seek re-election next year, saying he believes he can be more effective in that role than in pursuing a U.S. Senate bid, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) announced that he would not run for U.S. Senate from Iowa in 2014.

“This week, I made a simple device to put toothpaste back in the tube. But a device to put the Leftist genie back in the bottle is not so simple. The best tool we have now is the majority in the U.S. House which functions mostly to keep the Leftist genie in the bottle. I cannot, in good conscience, turn my back on the destiny decisions of Congress today in order to direct all my efforts to a Senate race for next year, while hoping to gain the leverage to put the genie back in the bottle in 2015.”

An Emerson College Polling Institute survey in Massachusetts finds Rep. Ed Markey (D) with a six-point lead over Gabriel Gomez (R) in the special election race for U.S. Senate, 42% to 36%.

Mike McFadden (R), a wealthy Minneapolis finance executive appears poised to enter the race against first-term Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), Politico reports.

“McFadden did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but made it clear last month that he is interested in the Senate race. He told Minnesota Public Radio in early April that he was ‘in the process of talking with my family, friends, colleagues and party leaders’ about a bid against Franken.”

Hillary Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will be the featured attractions at next month’s Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago, Politico reports.

“The focus of the gathering… is on speeding up the United States’ economic recovery and the nation’s long-term outlook… But the short-term political outlook will be equally interesting, given that Clinton and Christie top most 2016 polls in their respective parties.”

A new Red Racing Horses/PMI (R) poll in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district finds Mark Sanford (R) and Elizabdeth Colbert Busch (D) tied at 46% among likely voters with another 7% undecided.

The State notes Red Racing Horses says it is a “collaborative community of politics and
election enthusiasts run by six unnamed volunteers and that polls are
paid with reader donations.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) “may have his eye on the White House, but it looks his sister may be gunning for the opposite team,” the New York Observer reports.

“Mr. Cuomo’s sister, film producer Maria Cuomo-Cole, took to Twitter Friday morning to publicly support an EMILY’s List campaign to put a woman in the White House-a campaign that isn’t shy about it’s support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, widely considered Mr. Cuomo’s biggest barrier to the Democratic nomination.”

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Massachusetts finds the U.S. Senate special election is a surprisingly close race, with Rep. Ed Markey (D) leading Gabriel Gomez (R) by just four points, 44% to 40%.

Key findings: “Gomez is starting out as a pretty popular candidate, with 41% of voters rating him favorably to 27% with an unfavorable opinion. Beyond having good numbers with Republicans he’s at 42/24 with independents, and actually seen narrowly positively even by Democrats at 33/32. Voters meanwhile are more divided on Markey, with 44% holding a positive view of him to 41% with a negative one. He’s at 31/50 with independents.”

Byron York notes that Mitt Romney would have had to win an astonishing 73% of the Hispanic vote to prevail in the 2012 presidential election which “suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters.”

“The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.”