On the menu today: Voters head to the polls in primaries across the country, Biden’s approval ratings continue to plummet, and a new survey finds that Americans want athletes to compete against members of their own sex.

Primary Day in Four States

In South Carolina, Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota voters will head to the polls to vote in today’s primary elections. In Texas, they’ll vote in a special election to fill the seat of Democratic representative Filemon Vela, who resigned in March.

Two races in congressional districts in South Carolina feature Republican primaries, in which former president Donald Trump endorsed an upstart candidate in an effort to unseat Republican incumbents who have failed to support him. In the state’s seventh district, there’s Representative Tom Rice, who drew Trump’s ire after he voted to impeach the president following the events of January 6.

“I supported Donald Trump in both of his elections, and I supported him 94% of the time on the House floor,” Rice said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “But that’s not the question. It’s not about policy. The question is: Should he be held accountable for his role in the riots on January 6? And I think it’s very clear: The answer is yes.”

Angered by Rice’s impeachment vote, Trump endorsed South Carolina state representative Russell Fry, one of six Republicans challenging Rice, in the GOP primary. According to reporting from the Journal, Rice “faces a tough race”:

The Wall Street Journal spoke to more than two dozen voters throughout the district and found few were committed to voting for Mr. Rice, with most saying they planned to vote for Mr. Fry or someone else, citing the incumbent’s impeachment vote and his defense of the decision.
A recent survey by the Republican polling firm Trafalgar Group had Mr. Fry at 42%, with Mr. Rice at 25%. Mr. Fry’s campaign manager said internal polls have the challenger leading, while a separate report in the Washington Examiner on Mr. Rice’s internal polling had him up. A candidate needs a majority to advance directly to the general election, and the polls indicate the race might be headed for a runoff, which would be held two weeks later.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina’s first district, incumbent Republican Nancy Mace is facing a similar primary threat. Although she didn’t vote to impeach Trump, she did deliver a stern speech saying that the president needed to be held accountable for his actions, and she voted to certify the election results. Trump has endorsed former state representative Katie Arrington in the primary against Mace. The former president has campaigned on behalf of both Arrington and Fry and, to his own supporters, has called these races “two of the most critical primary elections in the country.”

Trump’s choice to endorse Arrington seems to be a case in which his love for grievance politics is overriding his judgment about who has a chance to win. Trump prides himself on endorsing only the best candidates, always betting on the winner. But Arrington has already proven herself able to lose: In 2018, she defeated Representative Mark Sanford in the GOP primary after Sanford criticized Trump, but then went on to lose to Democrat Joe Cunningham in November.

Over in Nevada, three out four of the state’s congressional seats are considered toss-ups. The New York Times has more:

Other tossup races include the Senate seat held by Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, and the governorship held by Steve Sisolak, also a Democrat. A Republican sweep would do real damage, not only to the Democrats’ narrow hold on Congress, but also to their chances in the 2024 presidential election if Nevada is close: It’s better to have the governor of a state on your side than on the other side.
But first, Republican voters need to sort through a vast array of candidates vying for each position. Joe Lombardo, the sheriff of Las Vegas’s Clark County, is the favorite for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Sisolak. He has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and echoes Mr. Trump’s language in his pledge to “take our state back.”
Eight candidates are vying to challenge Ms. Cortez Masto, but Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general who lost to Mr. Sisolak in 2018, is clearly favored.

Down in Texas, the GOP is going all-out in the special election to fill the 34th district seat vacated by Vela’s resignation in March. The 34th district is a traditionally Democratic stronghold in the Rio Grande Valley, but Republican candidate Mayra Flores has raised 16 times what Democrat Dan Sanchez has been able to muster. If Flores pulls off a win or even comes close, expect Republicans to use the race as a sign of things to come in November.

Biden’s Approval Ratings Continue to Drop

In the middle of last week, President Biden’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling average dropped to 39.7 percent, the lowest of his presidency. Today, it’s at 38.9 percent, and there are no signs that he’s heading for improvement any time soon.

As Dan McLaughlin noted last week, this is the second time that Biden’s approval rating has dipped below 40 percent. As of last week, his 55 percent disapproval rating put him more than 15 points under water. (His disapproval rating is at 54.6 percent in the RCP average today.)

New data from a Civiqs survey might help shed some light on exactly what’s happening to the president as we head into summer. According to that poll, Biden is at 33 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval, underwater by more than 20 points. His favorability ratings leave something to be desired, too. Just 38 percent of respondents say they have a favorable view of the president, compared to 56 percent who view him unfavorably.

If you track Civiqs data over the course of the past year, you will find that Biden’s approval first started to show signs of dropping around the time that the U.S. left Afghanistan, took another big dip around the holidays, ticked up very slightly around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine, and then began to drop once again.

Even among Democrats, Biden’s support is dropping off, at least according to Civiqs data from registered voters. Early last year, more than 90 percent of his own party approved of his job performance. Today, that number is only 71 percent, and his disapproval ratings among Democrats has climbed from nearly nonexistent to 15 percent. Perhaps most concerning of all for Democrats heading into the midterm elections, Biden is deeply unpopular among independents, and far more so than he was at this time last year. In June 2021, 30 percent of independents approved of Biden; today, only 17 percent say the same.

There’s still time for these numbers to rise a bit before voting season starts, but with inflation continuing to soar — hitting essential categories such as gas and groceries hardest — it’s hard to imagine there’s anywhere for him to go but down.

Americans Still Want Athletes to Compete against Members of Their Own Sex

A new poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland finds that a majority of Americans believe that athletes should compete against members of their own sex rather than the sex with which they identify. The poll surveyed more than 1,500 people across country during May and found that 55 percent said males — or, as the survey put it, “transgender women and girls — people whose sex was classified as male at birth but who currently identify as female” — should not be allowed to compete against females in high-school sports.

Fifty-eight percent said the same when it comes to college and professional athletics. Less than one-third of respondents favored allowing males to compete against females. More than two-thirds of respondents said male athletes have a competitive advantage over females.

The poll solidifies what has long been my contention: There might be some portion of the population that doesn’t care much about transgender issues and doesn’t mind if some people want to “live that way,” as they might put it. But if progressive activists continue to press on issues such as fairness in sports, female privacy and safety, and medical “transition” for children, that’s when the tide will start to turn against them.

ADDENDUM: This Wall Street Journal piece on parental controls for Instagram and the Metaverse is an interesting read. It’s just shocking to me that it’s taken this long for the company to launch these tools, especially considering what we’ve known for a while now about how digital technology negatively affects all of us, and how it affects younger users in particular.