Two Democrats and nine Republicans are facing off in special election primaries today for the House seat vacated by former Rep. Jo Bonner (R), the Mobile Press Register reports.

“Tuesday’s election is the first step toward doing that. A runoff election, expected to take place in the Republican Party’s primary involving Tuesday’s top two vote-getters, will occur on Nov. 5. The general election is Dec. 17.”

Trey Grayson (R) talks to New York magazine about the meteoric rise of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the man who beat him in their 2010 U.S. Senate race:

“He wasn’t very good at retail politics. He didn’t shake hands very well. He didn’t work the room. I remember thinking, I can stand here and shake hands, and I’m going to win that comparison. But one of the things that struck me was that at events, his staffers would always say to people, ‘Have you heard Dr. Paul speak?’ They wouldn’t say, ‘Have you met him?’ They would say, ‘Have you heard him speak?’ And it was interesting because he wouldn’t get up there and do all these little pleasantries. He wouldn’t begin with ‘Hey, it’s great to be here in Johnson County! It’s good to see Senator So-and-So, he’s doing a great job! I love your apple festival in the fall!’ He wouldn’t even say, ‘Thanks for having me! It’s nice to be here!’ He would just sort of begin his talk and it would be pretty serious. Even the jokes weren’t very lighthearted. But people would go to his town-hall events and tell their friends, ‘Hey, I heard this Dr. Paul guy, you should go hear him speak, he made some really good points.'”

David Frum: “Start with this fact about Ted Cruz: He is no Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. He is a hugely smart, highly focused political player, with a clear-eyed view of political realities. He defeated the most powerful Republican in Texas to win nomination to the U.S. Senate in months of hard campaigning. As a senator, he has overshadowed his senior colleague, John Cornyn, a former chair of the Republican National Senatorial committee. Cruz makes mistakes; everybody does. But he thinks before he acts, and his critics should appreciate that he has a plan.”

“The plan is obvious enough: to emerge as the next acknowledged political leader of American conservatism in the apostolic succession that begins with Robert Taft, continued through Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, and has had no agreed successor since Newt Gingrich’s retirement from Congress in 1998.”

Washington Post: “For all his success as an agitator of outside forces, Cruz has not set about trying to court Senate allies he will need to advance his agenda.”

A new Quinnipiac poll in New Jersey finds Cory Booker (D) leading Steve Lonegan by 12 points in the U.S. Senate race among likely voters, 53% to 41%.

Said pollster Maurice Carroll: “Maybe that ‘show horse vs. work horse’ charge from Lonegan is having an impact. While we can’t make a direct comparison between registered voters and likely voters, Booker did have a 54% to 29% registered voter lead over Lonegan in Quinnipiac’s August 7 pre-primary survey.”

Lynne Cheney told former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) to “shut your mouth” about supporting Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) over Cheney’s daughter Liz in the U.S. Senate race, the Cody Enterprise reports.

The conversation was conveyed in a Facebook post by Simpson’s daughter-in-law: “I wasn’t involved, just a bystander. But I won’t tolerate others that treat those I care about … with such disdain and disrespect. An intelligent woman like Lynne should realize that everyone is entitled to speak their mind and have an opinion. I was tempted to go tell her where she can go for speaking to a man I love that way when it occurred to me her so very classy commentary would be better shared here. Isn’t she a gem!”

Ravi Parikh has a fascinating chart of the voter turnout by state in the 2012 presidential election.

A new Washington Post poll in Virginia finds Terry McAuliffe (D) leads Ken Cuccinelli (R) in the race for governor, 47% to 39%, with Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis’s 10% “suggesting an unrest among voters not satisfied with either major-party contender.”

In a one-on-one matchup without Sarvis in the mix, the poll shows a narrower, 49% to 44% race between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli among likely voters.

A new NBC News/Marist poll finds McAuliffe leads Cuccinelli 43% to 38%, with Sarvis at 8%.

“A new academic paper digging into presidential betting in the final weeks of the 2012 election finds that a single trader lost between $4 million and $7 million placing a flurry of Intrade bets on Mitt Romney — perhaps to make the Republican nominee’s chance of victory appear brighter,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The anonymous trader placed 1.2 million pro-Romney contracts, some of which were actually in the form of bets against a Barack Obama victory. The most plausible reason for the betting, the authors conclude, is that ‘this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout.'”

“Any time you say, ‘There is no other means of salvation but through Jesus Christ, and if you don’t know him and you don’t follow him and you don’t go through him, you are engaged in some sort of false religion,’ that’s controversial. But it’s the truth.”

— Virginia Lt. Gov nominee E.W. Jackson (R) quoted by the Washington Post.