The number one single today in 1966 (which means that it predated the movie by two years):
The Beatles had an interesting day today in 1969. Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman …
… while George Harrison and wife Patti Boyd were arrested on charges of possessing 120 marijuana joints.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1968, this song went gold after its singer died in a plane crash in Lake Monona in Madison:
Today in 1956, RCA records purchased a half-page ad in that week’s Billboard magazine claiming that Elvis Presley was …
Ordinarily, if you have to tell someone something like that, the ad probably doesn’t measure up to the standards of accuracy. This one time, the hype was accurate.
Today in 1960, Britain’s Record Retailer printed the country’s first Extended Play and LP chart. Number one on the EP chart:
Today in 1963, the Beatles appeared in a concert at the East Ham Granada in London … as third billing after Tommy Roe and Chris Montez.
Today in 1964, Capitol Records released the Four Preps’ “Letter to the Beatles.”
The song started at number 85. And then Capitol withdrew the song to avoid a lawsuit because the song included a bit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released. Other than the run-on nature of the lyrics, the song was one of the first to have an accompanying “promo film,” now known as a “music video”:
Today in 1971, Radio Hanoi played the Star Spangled Banner, presumably not as a compliment:
Today in 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing marijuana at his farm in Campbelltown, Scotland.
McCartney’s excuse was that he didn’t know the seeds he claimed to have been given would actually grow.
With Donald Trump’s ascension to a third presidential nomination all but assured, political analysts are scouring the results of the early GOP primary contests for clues that might reveal the contours of a Trump-Biden rematch. In an otherwise sleepy Republican primary season, South Carolina’s Saturday contest, in which the former president won just under 60 percent of the vote to Nikki Haley’s 39.5 percent, suffices for drama. But the excitement, such as it is, will have to wait until November.
Across the first three early contests in South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa, a consistent pattern has emerged: Trump underperforms his polling. The average of Trump’s performance in polls heading into the Iowa caucuses pegged his lead at just under 34 points over his nearest competitor, Ron DeSantis. In the end, Trump’s margin of victory was just shy of 30 points. Likewise, Trump went into the election in New Hampshire beating Haley by over 19 points in the polling average. He beat her by about eleven points. The spread in South Carolina favored Trump by over 23 points, but his margin of victory ended up at around 20 points.
These relatively small discrepancies hardly constitute polling error once the peaks and valleys in the polling landscape are smoothed out in the aggregate. But, as Cook Political Report analyst Amy Walter wondered, these results may also suggest Trump’s vote share in pre-election polling represents a hard ceiling on his support — a threshold he approaches but never quite achieves, much less exceeds.
Some have attributed Trump’s relative softness at the ballot box to the dynamic of the primaries themselves. The former president’s boosters are quick to attribute Haley’s nearly 40 percent of the vote in South Carolina to Democratic interlopers, who, as was the case in New Hampshire, were able to participate in the GOP’s nominating contest if they met certain conditions. By contrast, as Trump’s defenders might insist, genuine Republicans are foursquare behind Trump’s renomination. The exit polling in South Carolina doesn’t bear that out.
Of the 68 percent of South Carolina primary voters who describe themselves as Republicans, 30 percent voted for Haley. The state’s former governor won the backing of 16 percent of voters who identify as “very conservative” and 43 percent of those who say they are “somewhat conservative.” Together, these two ideological orientations accounted for 77 percent of the South Carolina primary electorate. Only 16 percent of voters surveyed said Saturday’s election was the first GOP primary in which they had voted previously. The other 84 percent described themselves as veterans of the Republican nominating process and, of them, Haley won the backing of 36 percent. In Iowa (15 percent), New Hampshire (20 percent), and South Carolina (16 percent), a substantial number of GOP primary voters said they would be disappointed if Trump emerged as the party’s presidential nominee.
Taken together, Trump’s failure to meet the expectations set in pre-election surveys and exit polling indicating that roughly one-quarter of self-identified Republicans who voted in the early contests are still not sold on the former president’s candidacy. Observers might therefore conclude that Trump could have a real problem unifying GOP voters behind him in November. If so, we should also expect to see evidence of that in the polling of a potential head-to-head matchup between Trump and Joe Biden in the fall. But we don’t.
In recent polls that provide a breakdown of their results, regardless of whether those polls find Trump beating Biden or losing to him, the GOP is united behind their candidate. For example, the latest survey conducted by Quinnipiac University pollsters from February 15–19 found Trump coming up short in November with 45 percent of the vote to Biden’s 49 percent. But Trump isn’t losing for want of Republican support. Ninety-one percent of self-identified Republicans backed the president. The Economist/YouGov’s February 18–20 results showed Biden and Trump in a dead heat, with 42 and 43 percent of the overall vote, respectively. When voters who only “lean” toward one party or another were included, Trump has the support of 86 percent of Republicans when voters who lean toward one or the other party were included in that total. Without them, Trump’s total support among self-identified Republicans clocks in at 87 percent. Earlier this month, just one week after New Hampshire held its primary, an NPR/PBS/Marist College poll showed a tight race in November with Biden edging out Trump by one point at 47 to 48 percent. But Trump could nevertheless count on the support of 93 percent of Republicans to Biden’s 91 percent of Democrats.
None of these polls suggest Trump will struggle to unite the party around him as its presidential nominee, but you could be forgiven for assuming there is a crisis of disunity in the GOP’s ranks given the frenetic efforts from party officials to mute the appearance of intra-party tension. An increasingly vocal faction of the party has run out of patience with Haley’s quixotic candidacy — partly, as Audrey Fahlberg reported, because its continued existence postpones the onset of the “coming home” phase of hotly contested election. But Republican voters seem perfectly willing to tell pollsters they plan to abandon their misgivings about Trump by Election Day.
The general-election polling that forecasts a united GOP by Election Day isn’t hard to believe. That’s what we would expect following an exhausting and unusually prolonged general-election campaign that polarizes the electorate around the two party’s respective nominees. Trump’s ceiling, if he has one, is not made up of disaffected Republicans who still identify as Republicans. It would be composed of high-propensity suburban and exurban voters, voters with college and post-graduate degrees, and voters at the higher end of the income spectrum.
These voters may or may not still consider themselves Republicans such that they’re willing to describe themselves that way in conversations with pollsters. Indeed, according to Gallup’s January polling, only one-quarter of American adults now volunteer their identity as “Republican.” But most indications suggest that this 25 percent are either Donald Trump devotees or willing to subordinate their grievances with him to the objective of ejecting Biden from the White House.
“I just want to say that I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump exclaimed in a two-minute victory speech on Saturday night. Even if Trump is describing a smaller universe of potential Republican voters than the one he inherited in 2016, the data do not suggest that he’s wrong.
To be fair this is a bit meaningless to ask eight months before the election. But the GOP since Trump was elected wasn’t exactly successful, as demonstrated by not just Trump’s 2020 loss, but by the 2018 and 2022 midterms (where’s that “red tide”?).
Nikki Haley exited the presidential race on Wednesday with a final challenge for former president Donald Trump: to bring her more moderate and independent supporters into the MAGA fold.
To do so, GOP strategists say Trump will have to turn down the temperature of his rhetoric. It remains to be seen whether he will — or even can.
Haley said it is now on Trump to “earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that.”
“At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing,” Haley said, an apparent reference to Trump’s having said he would “permanently” ban anyone who donated to Haley from the MAGA camp.
But while Trump made an appeal for party unity in his speech on Tuesday, he showed little concern for bridging intraparty divisions in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday: “Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion, despite the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont, and various other Republican Primaries.”
He did ultimately go on to extend a gracious invitation to Haley’s supporters to “join the greatest movement in the history of our nation.”
GOP strategists told National Review this message is the exact opposite of the approach Trump should be taking.
To court these voters, Trump should focus on two things, says an adviser to a super PAC that supported Haley: make a concerted effort to prioritize reining in government spending and to generally soften his tone, as his rhetoric has harmed the Republican brand and turned off voters in key swing states.
“Whatever it is that he has to do, I think he is completely unwilling — and in many instances unable — to get himself to do what it takes,” the adviser said.
GOP strategist Alice Stewart similarly suggested that Trump has had a difficult time getting out of his own way when trying to broaden his appeal.
“You have to look at what attracted Haley supporters to her, and a big part of that is the fact that she advocated for less drama and less chaos,” she said. “And that’s what Donald Trump needs to recognize.”
On this issue, Trump could stand to take a page out of President Biden’s book: The Democrat issued a more even-keeled appeal to Haley’s voters in a statement on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign,” he said.
He added: “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”
In further evidence that Democrats have their sights set on Haley’s supporters, a super PAC that advocated for non-Republicans to support Haley in the GOP primary contests will now shift its focus to urging Haley’s voters to support Biden in November, Semafor first reported.
“This is an effort from people who have actually supported Nikki Haley to try to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy, even if they may disagree with him politically,” Primary Pivot co-founder Robert Schwartz told Semafor. The group will now become Haley Voters for Biden and will focus on Haley voters in key states including Michigan and North Carolina.
This appeal is a smart one, says Republican strategist Lorna Romero-Ferguson, who believes Biden absolutely has a chance to pull in some of these voters.
“The message that President Biden issued this morning was spot on and it was the right tone,” she said.
Also smart was Biden’s decision to run against Trump from the very beginning, the Arizona-based strategist adds. Though Trump did in fact face more formidable primary challengers than did the current president, he spent more time than he should have attacking Haley rather than attacking Biden, she suggested, contributing to the uphill battle Trump now faces to bring in Haley voters he may have alienated.
“My fear is that they’re going to take those voters for granted, that they’re going to make the assumption that they will all just come home at the end of the day and support Trump, which we’ve seen in previous election cycles since 2016 that that hasn’t necessarily played out for Republicans who have run a Trump-type campaign,” she said.
Meanwhile, the super-PAC adviser warned that many people are “in denial” that Trump has a problem among Republican voters. “People will point to the fact that it’ll be like, oh, independents or Democrat voters or former Biden voters were the ones voting for Haley,” the adviser said. “What we don’t have is any indication of how many people or how many of those people are former Republicans, and so there are a lot of Republican or potential Republican voters that Trump needs to be successful that he has a problem with.”
NR’s Noah Rothman predicts that Haley voters will in fact come home to the GOP candidate in the fall, “so long as their candidate gives them a reason to.” However, Republicans will be in trouble if they convince themselves that the anti-Trump vote in the primaries is attributable only to “resistance libs,” or if they suggest those who are skeptical of Trump’s candidacy are “welcome to leave” the party, as Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the incoming co-chair of the RNC, recently said.
But in a strong sign that even Trump’s GOP detractors will fall in line, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally endorsed the former president on Wednesday despite the pair’s strained relationship.
And Stewart says Trump is poised to benefit from having faced only a short primary challenge, giving him more time to line up with the RNC and merge resources to take on Biden, a benefit that is “immeasurable.”
In the end, the lesson of Nikki Haley’s run is that Donald Trump defeated every wing of the Republican Party along the way to becoming its champion. In 2016, he beat the avatar of Tea Party constitutional populism in Ted Cruz. In 2024, he bested the reformist culture war version of himself in Ron DeSantis, and then dispatched the post-George W. Bush-era form of suburbanite compassionate conservatism in Haley, who speaks in a combination of defense-industry jargon and Bible verses. He even brought the older era of Chamber of Commerce Federalist Society Reaganite to heel, with Mitch McConnell endorsing him today. Trump’s dominance over the GOP is total.
The problem Trump has, of course, is that he can’t win just with that authoritative GOP support. He needs a certain portion of Nikki Haley’s demographic in the six or seven key swing states that will make the difference in this election. That demographic has a strong resistance into being bullied into anything — well-educated suburban voters who are unenthused about an election where they hate both candidates nearly equally, for different reasons. These voters are the reason Glenn Youngkin, Brian Kemp and other Republican politicians who kept Trump at arm’s length were able to win, even over his animosity. As much as Republicans are used to threading the needle on these close national elections, Trump winning them over will dramatically increase his paths to victory.
So how do you do that? Tone is obviously one factor. The more Trump emphasizes winning through success and bringing people into the fold as opposed to driving people out of it and embarking on a mission of revenge, the better. Speaking seriously on issues like abortion and IVF matters. But the vice presidential choice has to be front of mind as well. If there’s one message to take away from Haley’s speech announcing her campaign’s suspension, it was: don’t pick Vivek, or anybody like him. Trump will have to weigh his tendency toward wanting to pick someone who stands as their own man or woman, and presumably the inheritor of the leading candidate for 2028, against the satisfaction of picking a Mini-Me.
What’s clear now is that there was no path for Haley within the Republican nomination once Ron DeSantis left the field. She needed him in the race to keep Trump’s totals lower and have any shot at states where she polled in the forties. It speaks again to the nature of the new populist coalition that makes up the GOP’s primary electorate that even a late-game injection of serious donor money couldn’t make a serious difference. The long-term question for the Republicans, though, is who can lead them after this cycle. Trump the individual has command of this new beast. But there will need to be others as well — and that’s definitely not Nikki Haley.
On the one hand, Biden is not remotely conservative, and neither are his supporters. There is not a single issue on which Democrats have a better position than Republicans. On the other hand, Trump’s cozying up to Vladimir Putin, his anti-free-trade policy and other positions are not mainstream Republican positions either. And that’s all before Trump’s aberrant personality and mouth that would earn him several belts in the face if he said what he says from the protection of distance to people’s faces.
Given that Haley won in just Vermont, Bernie Sanders land, and the District of Columbia, a significant portion, maybe most, of Haley’s voters may be write-offs. Of course, Biden has his own problem with voters who like Arab terrorists — I mean, think Biden is insufficiently stern toward Israel, this country’s oldest ally in the Middle East.
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present Britain’s number one single today in 1970:
The number one single over here today in 1970 was by an act that had already broken up:
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
The Supreme Court giveth, and the Supreme Court taketh away. First, the giveth. And it was a big one. Bloomberg ran its report under the headline, “Supreme Court Buries Democrats’ Fantasy of Keeping Trump Off the Ballot.” As you have probably already heard echoing across America’s digital fields and electronic byways, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday as many of us had predicted, in a sweeping 9-0 decision in favor of President Trump.
As a result, he stays on the ballot in Colorado. And, because of a courageous 6-3 twist in the decision by the conservative justices, Trump also stays on ballots in all the other blue states drafting in Colorado’s steaming, radioactive wake. But I’ll get to that later.
The decision wasn’t complicated. I’ll quickly summarize how we got here, for people who live in Portland. Four Republican voters and two Democrats sued Colorado’s Secretary of State last year arguing Trump was an oathbreaking insurrectionist and, under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, could not hold “an office of the United States.”
After a kangaroo show trial, and an appeal, Colorado’s Supreme Court put down their crayons and ruled 4-3 — in napalm — that the Constitution prohibits oathbreaking insurrectionists like Trump from being President. The decision electrified the chronically-unhappy anti-Trump world. Eureka! they cried. It’s so simple! they shouted, in manifest joy and delirious delight.
We must save democracy by giving courts power to keep Republicans off the ballot in the first place.
Corporate media rallied, trotting out herds of constitutional “experts” sagely opining about the Framers’ wisdom in excluding oathbreaking insurrectionists and blah blah blah. But there was a problem.
The problem was, the particular dusty, archaic Constitutional provision was part of the Fourteenth Amendment — one of the two anti-slavery amendments added after the Civil War. It was designed solely to stop pro-slavery Democrats from marching back into Reconstruction-era state governments.
No way did the drafters — having just won the bloodiest war in American history or in its future the hard way — no way did they intend to hand a heckler’s veto over future American Presidents to disgruntled Southern States still bristling with unsurrendered Klansmen and brimming with defiant Johnny Rebs burning to snatch up muskets.
The Court agreed. It uncontroversially ruled that “States may disqualify persons” from state offices, but any power over federal offices must be explicitly granted by Congress. Hinting at the decision’s originalist underpinnings, the Court quoted an 1858 commentary on the Constitution:
Because federal officers “owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people,” powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically “dele- gated to, rather than reserved by, the States.”
In other words, Colorado does not get to veto a Presidential candidate just because it didn’t wear its Hillary mask and caught Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This result may have been obvious to me and other thoughtful Constitutional scholars. And it was obvious to the United States Supreme Court — including its far-left members. But it was not obvious to Colorado’s Supreme Court or to squadrons of blabbering morons trotted out by corporate media who are now all losing their ever-loving minds to save their tattered reputations.
One of those blabbering morons was David French, who — like a defiant Johnny Reb of old — refused to admit he was wrong and promptly published a defiant op-ed in the New York Times …
The Nation’s leftist legal correspondent, Elie Mystal, was so mad he even called for the Supreme Court to be abolished. …
Mystal’s deranged screed was particularly amusing in its inherent contradiction: the whole case was about giving the courts more power, but now they suddenly want to take power away from courts? It would be confusing except I’ve learned not to expect them to make sense.
NewsBusters rounded up a series of crazy liberal reactions, who generally agreed that yesterday was a dark day for ‘democracy’ …
I could go on, there is certainly a Schadenfreude-y delight to it, but time presses and you can find more for yourself if you like.
Some people just can’t admit when they are wrong, what else can I tell you? Why anyone listens to them at all is the real mystery.
I mentioned the twist, the conservative justices’ brave 6-3 ruling. The three liberal justices — Sotomayor, Sagan, and Jackson — joined the 9-0 verdict but not its reasoning. So they wrote their own separate opinion.
Specifically, the liberal Justices disagreed with the majority’s decision that no state can disqualify Trump. They would have avoided interpreting the Constitutional issue altogether, and would have ruled that only Colorado was barred from disqualifying Trump:
Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision. Because we would decide only the issue before us, we concur only in the judgment.
In other words, the majority’s ruling deleted all the other efforts to bar Trump from ballots in all the other states, not just Colorado. That may seem sensible to you, but it didn’t make sense to the liberal Justices.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 