MASSACHUSETTS: State Attorney General Martha Coakley faces a big fundraising hurdle, the Boston Globe writes. "How big? If $5 million is the goal, she must raise an average of $58,000 every day for the next 86 days. Even if the target is a more modest $3 million, that's $34,000 a day. Coakley has advantages in being the only statewide elected official in the race, but fund-raising is not one of them. Because cash raised for state campaigns cannot be used in a federal election, she started the race with zero money and no federal campaign account before Sept. 3, the date of her campaigns statement of organization. 'I think to reach voters in the state, even in a short period of time, a campaign would have to have between $5 million and $7 million,' said Martin T. Meehan, the former US representative who has more than $4.8 million in his dormant campaign account but declined to enter the race to continue as chancellor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell." 

NEW JERSEY: A new Monmouth University/Gannett poll puts Republican nominee Chris Christie eight points ahead of his opponent Jon Corzine, 47%-39%. But Patrick Murray, Monmouth's polling director, says the numbers indicate there is a lot of churning in this electorate. Despite the incumbent's continued unpopularity, there is still a sense that anything can happen. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Christie leading by 10. And Christie had led by 14 in the last Monmouth poll. Still, 39% for an incumbent is pretty low. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that national Democratic and Republican groups have funneled more than $5 million into the New Jersey gubernatorial race. As far as the implications of this year's gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia to the 2010 elections, University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato is wary of overstating an effect. He noted that since 1965, only two off-year governors races preceded same-party successes or failures in the midterms.

TENNESSEE: Incumbent Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Jew who represents a majority African-American district, is receiving another primary challenger from a black Democrat -- and the race is over race. "A Congressional race in Tennessee has become freighted with racial overtones almost a year before the election, with a prominent black politician saying the white incumbent cannot properly represent black voters… The black candidate, former Mayor Willie W. Herenton of Memphis, has argued that Tennessee needs a black voice in its currently all-white delegation."

"'To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans,' Mr. Herenton said in a recent radio interview on KWAM. 'He's played the black community well.'"

VIRGINIA: Despite Democrat Creigh Deeds' jabs at Bob McDonnell's conservative stances on abortion, homosexuality and working women, Republican Bob McDonnell sidesteps those issues as he tries to stay above the fray, the Washington Post writes. "McDonnell's strategy has proven difficult the past two weeks after the release of the thesis, but the campaign insists it's the right one. Of Deeds strategy, which also includes repeated attempts to tie McDonnell to the policies of George W. Bush, McDonnell said, 'He's talking about former presidents and former governors and divisive social issues'… He's talking about things people don't care about. So why would I engage him?'"