Magnificent News: Today's Opinions: Who the first Republican to drop out will be

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By Drew Goins
Assistant editor

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In today's edition:

Who gets out of the 2024 race, and who stays in to embarrass themselves?
A more nuanced view on guns and gun education
Ways the government should step up maternal health care
Solutions? For Congress and Social Security? It's more likely than you think.

Race to the bottom/out the door

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy during a town hall meeting on May 19 in Chicago. (Paul Beaty/AP)

With the excitement of "Who's getting into the presidential race?" largely behind us, now a thrill-hungry country turns its attention to … who's getting out.

Data columnist David Byler scried into his Excel spreadsheets and came away with a few predictions.

First is that at least one on-paper front-runner should be expected to fail early, David writes. The prophecy — er, statistical pattern — also says that oddballs often outlast more serious contenders — see Andrew Yang. (Don't worry, David juicily maps these predictions onto actual people in the column.)

Then again, David writes, if former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis "keep hogging" their current vote shares, the others will drop like flies, no matter their pedigree.

Alas, that didn't happen before plenty of candidates had the chance to embarrass themselves in what the Editorial Board is calling the "pardon sweepstakes." It's the emerging MAGA purity test in the GOP field: Will you commit to pardoning Trump if elected president?

In addition to undermining the rule of law, the board writes, the Republicans who've pledged a pardon are simply committing bad politics. They are "refusing to forcefully challenge the front-runner over behavior that is clearly disqualifying," the board writes, so "they shouldn't count on Republican primary voters to reach the conclusion on their own."

Their exercise is futile anyway, because, as columnist Gene Robinson writes, one candidate has practically out-MAGA'd them all already — and he's running as a Democrat.

Chaser: Speaking of those Trump charges, associate editor Ruth Marcus had a former prosecutor explain to her what was most surprising about the indictment.

'Abstinence-only' doesn't work for guns, either

(Zoe van Dijk for The Washington Post)

There's a striking image in writer Maddy Butcher's latest dispatch from the Mountain West. Butcher describes a mom who's a diligent recycler and partial to Patagonia puffer vests. This mom happens to feel equally strongly about her "preferred shotguns and rifles."

This person (not far from Butcher's own identity) doesn't comport with a lot of gun-owner stereotypes. Butcher explains why that's part of the problem in our "if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us" discourse around guns.

Her op-ed lays out the more nuanced views a lot of people in her neck of the woods — including those moms — hold about guns. Many of them, it turns out, revolve around education. Just as an abstinence-only education doesn't serve kids when it comes to sex, she writes, a "shun-gun approach" does little good for firearm safety.

It might be a provocative idea to a city-dwelling family more used to active-shooter drills at school. But Butcher, who grew up shooting a pellet gun out her bathroom window, argues the approach could serve the whole country.

From Alyssa Rosenberg's column mourning the post-childbirth death of Olympic runner Tori Bowie, and of many mothers like her.

To put the U.S. maternal mortality rate in more context, Alyssa writes that it's "three times the rate of many high-income nations." Obviously, this is unacceptable — even more so when you consider the disproportionate harm to Black mothers.

There's also so much that can be done now, things that provably decrease maternal deaths; Alyssa runs through a raft of them in her column. Refreshingly, members of Congress from both parties are getting to work on some strategies.

But Alyssa writes that the country owes an all-out effort to keep its moms and babies safe.

Chaser: Columnist Jennifer Rubin writes that another element of reproductive health — abortion — might be an even bigger problem for the GOP than Trump.

More politics

(The Washington Post)

Which seems more impossible — fixing Congress or fixing Social Security? Public affairs professor Steven Pearlstein and contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru have pieces to remind us that neither has to be.

Granted, there's a whole lot of daylight between "possible" and "probable." Pearlstein's solution involves Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrangling moderates of both parties to change House rules to sideline extremists. Ramesh's answer involves Republicans overcoming "their instinctive belief that 'redistribution' is the worst thing about the welfare state" to direct more money to poor people. My hand passing through my desk unimpeded involves quantum tunneling.

All technically possible! Still, despite the long-shot odds, Pearlstein and Ramesh's fixes are compelling. They're worth reading — and crossing your fingers for.