Three months into the first stage of the presidential election process, the field has narrowed to four candidates on the Republican side and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling it out for each state on the Democratic side. In a recent poll, IVN found that if the election were held today, Bernie Sanders would carry the independent vote in a landslide.

In an interesting technical maneuver, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has transferred his personal website from company servers to an independent host.  This move, remarkably similar to those taken prior to his successful bids for mayor, appears to indicate a step toward an independent bid for the presidency.

Up until mid-February, MikeBloomberg.com had been hosted on a server run by Bloomberg, L.P. -- Bloomberg's financial information company. The website is now hosted by Amazon.com, which provides web hosting and cloud services.

Following the weekend's primaries and the upcoming votes on Tuesday, many eyes remain fixed on a presidential candidate who has been highly touted, but has delivered few victories, leading to concerns about his campaign's viability.

Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a candidate lauded as the future of the Republican Party, has failed to break through in this election cycle. As more critical elections approach, the senator could be left questioning the justification for his campaign.

With problems ranging from millions uninsured to unsustainable liabilities, there are many obstacles to resolving the health care crisis. The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) along partisan lines has been a savior for some and a nightmare for others, generally indicating that it's less than ideal.

The United States is one of the few developed countries that doesn't offer some sort of universal health care and yet, even discussing such a system generates partisan bickering.

Editor's note: This article was written by Peter Ackerman, chairman of Level the Playing Field, and Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. It originally published in The Washington Post.

 

As always, in the current  race for the presidency each of the candidates claims to have the “best” plan for the economy—without demonstrating any cognizance of our economy’s real flaws. For people on the political left, the problems most commonly cited are unemployment and poverty. People on the political right most often cite tax rates and the size of the debt public debt. Chronic instability as such (wobbling between recession and inflation) hardly ever gets mentioned, though if we are experiencing a recession or inflation each side is anxious to blame the other for it.