David Atkins

Yesterday Hillary Clinton took the first step in trying to prevent Donald Trump from tacking to the center: If Donald J. Trump starts to soften his image, Hillary Clinton has a warning for voters. Don’t believe it. “Trump,” she said at a rally here on Saturday, “keeps saying things like, ‘Well, you know, uh, I […]

Donald Trump’s crushing win in New York, combined with his significant lead in Indiana and 18-point lead in California are leading many prognosticators to believe that he will come very close to or even reach the magic 1,237 delegate number needed to secure the GOP nomination. But some GOP power brokers, including one on the […]

The unexpected twists and turns of the 2016 presidential election have exposed interesting fault lines within both the Democratic and Republican coalitions. But they have also revealed something even more uncomfortable: that our system of picking presidential candidates is inadequate, lacks transparency and accountability, and faces a fundamental legitimacy problem. Clinton and Sanders have spent […]

Terry McAuliffe is no friend of the netroots progressive movement. For a long time he has represented to many on the left a centrist and business-friendly version of the party that they would prefer to leave behind in favor of a more ideological position. That said, McAuliffe’s decision to restore voting rights to over 200,000 […]

Google has unveiled its newest robot, and…well, see for yourself. This is early stages yet, but there’s little reason to believe that within a few decades we won’t be seeing machines incorporating this technology to take over a lot of manual labor and personal assistant jobs moving forward. Meanwhile, car manufacturers are moving at full […]

It’s often easy to become discouraged at the state of national politics. Given Republican control of the House, there’s very little chance of either Clinton’s or Sanders’ policy priorities going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean that progress isn’t happening in blue states around the country. Consider again the example of California, where rules finally went […]

It’s occasionally important to remember that as we write about the twists and turns of presidential campaign politics, we are in fact talking about the process that selects the person who will have control of the nuclear launch codes and veto power over our country’s legislative system. In that context, watching the near-craziness of the […]

After all the sturm und drang of the Republican contests it appears to come to this: all signs point to a brokered GOP convention, as it’s unlikely that Donald Trump will reach the absolute majority of delegates required to take the nomination outright. If current electoral patterns hold, Trump will likely fall just short of […]

At the heart of much of the debate between the Clinton and Sanders camps is the role of asset wealth in a democracy: can it be used for good in a way that allows a rising tide to theoretically lift all boats even if wages stagnate, or is the mere fact that so much wealth […]

It would appear that the gloves are indeed off in the Democratic primary. As so often happens when candidates start to sharpen their knives, the surrogates are the first to test various lines of attack. Sanders surrogates have foolishly brought up the Clinton email brouhaha, for instance, and now it appears that at least one […]