Morning Joe - U.S. hits Iranian oil tankers after attacks on Navy ships

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

September 9, 2026: 8 am — U.S. hits Iranian oil tankers after attacks on Navy ships  To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yeah, as soon as I hugged him, I seen he was crying already, and I was like, man, I know. I've been there. I've been there twice, to be fair. Lost in five. Obviously, you know, I've been serving for the max to make semis, but he's young and he hasn't been there, and we're super tight. Like, we've always had great relationship. We laugh and joke all the time.

He's like one of my good buddies on tour and hurts it. I know how much that hurts. I know how much you wanted it today is something that you dream about. So I just told him, bro, I know, but you're going to be here so many more times, man. I'm going to be in a rocking chair when you do so. Francis Tiafo talking about his post-match hug with fellow American Alex Mickelson, who he eliminated yesterday at the U.S. Open after Mickelson was just a few points away from advancing to his first ever Grand Slam semifinal.

And you were there last time. I was there for the match after, but this one went so long that I walked into this incredible moment. last shot. Good morning. Welcome to Morning, Joe. It's Wednesday, September 9th, along with Joe, Willie, and me. We have the co-host of our 8-m. Our staff writer at the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire. MS now National Security Reporter David Road and managing editor at the bulwark. Sam Stein is with us. All right. Sam's up to it. Sam's all ready to school. He does have one, you know. Prep school ends one day. One day we're all out in the cold, tough, world. Sam, it's going to be okay.

Very sharp. The oldest prep school grad. He's a dors. He doesn't get into Dartmouth. He's in class. You know what? Go big dreams, Sam. You're going to love that orientation.

They take you on a camping trip. It's very nice. Very nice. Just to be clear, all you guys are talking simultaneously, and it's impossible to hear you. I have no idea what you're saying, yeah. That's what he does. But we can hear you loud and clear, Cam.

So, wait. night. A couple incredible matches. Again, the story of Tiafa, the fact that the fact that his father comes from Sierra Leone and that he works on a construction project for a

tennis center in Maryland. They'd like him. Say, hey, if you want to take care of the grounds, that's fine. He doesn't have the money for his kids to live anywhere. They live in an old office with him. And he learns tennis. And here we

He's now going into the semifinals of the U.S. Open. Willie, that is the American dream. A lot of people in White House don't understand it, not getting political here. They don't like these stories. They don't understand these stories. They think these people from other countries should be kept out. No, no, this is America. This is what makes our hearts swell with pride to see that in America, anything is possible.

Yeah, it's family refugees from war. in Sierra Leone. So they fled to the United States. His father, as you said, was a custodian at a tennis center. They built it out. Tiafo and his twin brother lived there. Just took up tennis because it was there and look at him now in the semifinals to the U.S. Open with a chance to clear a hurdle.

He hasn't been able to get over now. He will play in the semifinal Shelton. Come on, man. That's a match that ended at 333 AM Eastern City. You and I were just leaving the orphanage. That's right. We stopped by. We were in flushing anyway. Of course.

She'll be up there. Shelton wins, beats Alcaraz in five sets, matches four hours and 30 minutes. By the way, still a lot of people there, 3.30 in the morning. Impressive crowd. Just an incredible match. So now we get an all-American semi-final. Tiafo Shelton guaranteeing, John, we get an American in the men's final this weekend. And long overdue, an American make that runs. It's a mate. Tiafo is such an extraordinary story, and that was such an incredible match. And yet, maybe not the best of the day. That's how good last night was, too. I will note, and not just to be grump. guy who has to get up early. These matches start a little bit late. It's scheduled to start at 10.30.

No, I know. It doesn't make any. That can't be good for television ratings. That can't be good to grow the sport. People are missing these matches. But yes, we talk about it every year. The U.S. Open arguably is the best two weeks in the New York sports calendar. And it has more than lived up to the hype.

We've got two Americans there. And we've got Americans alive on the women's side as well. I mean, imagine if you had one of those matches, prime time TFO. I know. And then that one, prime time. tonight, everybody would be watching it. Even the semifinals, this Friday night, the second men's semifinal would be over at midnight. Oh, yeah.

Something like that. But on the women's side, Jessica Pagula advanced. So she's in the semifinals, has to play Sabalinka again. And you might get Cocoa golf. If she wins today, she could be in the semis as well. You know, it's crazy. They show the stat every year and every year, I mean, for people that are a bit more casual tennis watchers like myself, they show the stat that no American has won a major.

Sure. Since 2003. That's crazy. Yeah, and erotic. You guys open way back. Gosh. Going on 25 years now. One year after year, incredible run. 2002, Willie wins open. Nobody saw that coming. We were eliminated very early in doubles, though. We were. We just didn't have the stamina. You should not have been smoking in between sets.

Well, the problem was I walked on the court and I had to cut off jeans and keep on drunken t-shirt. You were reprimanded. I thought Sam won. Didn't Sam win any? Sam. He wasn't even born. He's still in the juniors next year, I think. I plan for Lane Kiss. Yeah, exactly. All right, let's get to that. He is grumpy today. Let's get to the news. Can we please? The United States military says it destroyed five Iranian oil tankers yesterday in response to Iran's recent attempted attacks on a U.S. Navy warship. The latest back and forth comes as the war, stretches into its seventh month. U.S. Central Command released this video of the strikes,

saying they hit four of Tehran's tankers in the Gulf of Oman and one near Karg Island, a hub for Iranian oil exports. The statement said the crews of the five vessels were told to abandon ship before the attacks. In response, Iran launched missiles toward American targets in Jordan, with Jordan's military saying its air defense systems intercepted 18 ballistic missiles, while two others fell in unpopulated areas. This renewed cycle of strikes is one that may continue. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters yesterday during his trip to Colombia that the U.S. would respond every time Iran targeted its naval ships.

All of this, sending oil prices back up, reaching 100,000, dollars a barrel this morning for the first time in months. You know, David, if the president's going to pursue the strategy he's going to pursue, which is to really choke Iran off economically, and that's really his only good play left, this does make sense. I mean, he's hitting economic targets right now. And you're getting the first glimpses over the past couple of weeks of the Iranians starting to say, we've got to end.

this war, certainly the political leaders trying to get the Revolutionary Guard to understand that this economy is in full class. I mean, this is a crazy thing. The Iranian Iran's government was buckling because their economy was so bad in February when this war began. Now imagine how terrible the economy is right now. And with these strikes, again, it's bad news for American consumers, but at the same time, this appears to be the only path this president or any president can go down that finds themselves in this quandary. It does seem to be a clear strategy, and it is having an impact. They've stopped all exports of oil from Iran in terms of taking out these tankers. So Iran is trying again to escalate, this escalation dominance thing we talked about

in the beginning of the war, where whenever the U.S. strikes something, they hit back even harder, but many people say this is the first consistent strategy in a while, you're going to see oil prices go up, hitting $100 a barrel. And essentially, the Iranians think that Trump at some point is going to blink. He, and we'll talk about this more, but it's the same thing. But I thought, I thought, knowing Donald Trump, as I've known him for a long time, a lot of other observers thought, he would have blinked a long time ago. He tried to blink. He tried to bribe the Iranians, and then he learned very quickly, they couldn't even be bribed for $500 billion. So at that point, what choice do you have?

Yes, and I would just say the critical thing is that he stick to a clear message, the Iraq messaging where it's sort of, we're going to, you know, annihilate you as a civilization or we're going to, you know, they suddenly are going into peace talks. If he sticks with this embargo strategy, which I think is something the U.S. military has been pushing, that's the question is, can he be consistent, you know, for weeks and months? And John, there was a moment before David Ignatius went on break that David brought up yesterday where the president said, basically we're going to keep our head down. We're going to kind of low-key this and see what happens.

If you sort through all of the madness and all of the chaos that came after that to now, that's actually, if you look at what's been going on, that's sort of been the strategy as far as choking them off economically. Yeah, I mean, we're grading on the curve here, but in terms of message discipline, Trump has largely stuck to this idea that what's going to be this economic chokehold and will hit as needed. I mean, we're not seeing tweets that say peace is at hand. No. Oh, my gosh, we have a piece still. It's going to be signed on Sunday. It's been a while since that.

They've also stopped the talk of, like, wiping out their civilization and we've had a praise be to Allah in a few weeks either. The problem is it's still two competing goals here for this White House. On one hand, there is this economic strategy, which is going to be a longer-term play. It's going to take a while to roll out the sanctions, this chokehold, because Tehran has shown a remarkable resilience so far with their economy. And frankly, they don't much care if their people are suffering. So that's one. That's going to take a while. The problem is the clock is ticking towards the midterms.

And as David just said, this strategy, though it's probably his best play, though it's very well, some observers think this could work, it's going to keep oil prices. high. And if there are these sporadic strikes, Willie, it's going to keep the war in the headlines, which is the last thing Republicans want now two months until voters go to the polls. I know that does Donald Trump. He's tried to turn the page for months on this war. I'm just looking over David's shoulder at the prices there. Crude, $95 a barrel. Brent crude, $100 a barrel, Sam Stein. So obviously, this is an economic strategy at this point from the White House, but as the guys just said, is to underline it. By attacking those oil tankers, the price of oil goes up, making President Trump's domestic problems even worse, making gas prices higher here for people going

to the pump and making Republicans running for re-election this fall, making their job much more difficult. Yeah, and I don't disagree with anything that was said, but I guess the only question I have is, to what end are we doing this, right? What does the offer imp actually look like? We had a memorandum of understanding that was pretty vague in terms of its objectives. Is the idea here regime change? Is it weapons inspectors getting access?

to sites? Is it ending formally the nuclear ambitions? I mean, what is the actual end game? I think that matters here because if we are going to do this long-term economic focus strategy, if we are going to just rest on an embargo, attack their oil tankers, and endure the pain at the pump, there has to be some sort of diplomatic offer. And from everything I've seen, it's unclear if there's actually diplomatic back channels happening, real diplomatic back channels, not the sort of talks here and there. And also, also a stated clear list of objectives that we want to get done. After that, this is just a crisis and stasis, right?

Right. It is, David. I would guess that looks, though, at the end, the straight opened, the status quo after the war that we had before the war, so Iran can't run around saying we've actually improved our standing economically since the war. That's number one. And number two, some sort of nuclear inspection. and Donald Trump won't get rid of the Iranian nuclear program,

but if they can go back to some sort of inspection regime, then he can say we won. Yes, and there are players, just since Sam's question, the Qataris are trying to work this out, the Pakistanis and the Omanis are as well. And you have a divide in the Iranian government. The hardliners do think that Trump will blink and be erratic, and we are here because of five, six months of just mixed messaging.

This strategy could have been settled on much sooner, and we'll see if the president can stick to him. And you're writing about the uprising the Trump called for in Iran never happened. Why? So, and this is more critical of the president. My apologies. But I talked to six current and former U.S. officials. And the president who started calling again for an uprising, it's sort of a microcosm for the entire war. It was completely rushed and there was sort of no thorough planning. These six officials called me this idea of an uprising in the way the U.S. approached it and the Israelis, to be fair, it was rushed, amateurish, not realistic, flawed from the beginning, and a fantasy. And it's been a messaging problem

with the president. He initially called for this in the February 28th speech for them to rise up. And then he starts changing his messaging immediately in March, where he's suddenly saying also that there's going to be an incursion by armed Kurds from Iraq. But then President Erdogan of Turkey pushes back against that and he sort of calls that off all of a sudden. He then sort of, after calling for Iranians to rise up, he says, well, we're not sure people should go out the streets. He correctly is warning about, you know, and the problem, of course, is the Iranian government governing, I'm sorry, gunning people down. And so essentially this failed. It's just a microcosm of the president's messaging being off. And then there's a key question of what did Netanyahu

promise here. Did the Mossad say, we're going to be able to quickly stoke a massive uprising? And it would have taken ending an internet blackout in Iran. You'd need some army units. to switch over to the side of them and then this possible Kurdish incursion. So it's just, again, a tragedy for the Iranian people that was a result of a rush to war and poor plan. You didn't have to look far, though, David. It had been, what, a month, six weeks before that, when young Iranians did take to the streets at the beginning of this year and were, by some estimates, gun down in

numbers up to 30 or 40,000. So did they not look at that and say, well, an uprising, just because we've decapitated the top of the government, is not going to work here? There's one former CIA official who supports what the president is doing, wants to see this regime, you know, fall in Iran. But the moment was then in January. We didn't do that because our carriers and other forces were in Venezuela. We hadn't, we couldn't do it then. We didn't have enough forces.

So it's, again, this kind of going to war too quickly, overestimating what we can achieve, overestimating what our service members can carry out. And instead, you know, fewer things over longer times, a clearer. focus will lead to more success. Coming up, Nate Silver is still counting the longtime data whiz is rolling out a new podcast to crunch the numbers on politics polling and President Trump. He joins the table with a preview straight ahead on Morning Joe. Welcome back to Morning Joe. We're following clashing court rulings yesterday, which threw Missouri's congressional elections into chaos. It's the latest in a legal tug of war that comes less than two months before the November midterms.

Now, first, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned down a Republican-backed emergency appeal that looked to block a Missouri Supreme Court ruling last week that restored earlier congressional lines and ordered voters to weigh in on their redistricting plan in November for use in future elections. But then, in a decision made within minutes of Kavanaugh's ruling, a federal judge in Missouri ruled in favor of two GOP. congressional candidates who argued the new map, which was in place for the August primaries, must be used in November in order to avoid federal constitutional violations. The competing court rulings left Missouri in the exact same position it was before,

with no clear decision on which congressional map will be used in November, but the state Republican Attorney General and Governor say it will use the new map, which, unsurprisingly, favors Republicans. Opponents have already appealed and say they will also ask Justice Kavanaugh to intervene with that, which signals the fight is likely to continue in court. Coming up ahead here on Morning Joe, why the DSA's late Senate challenge highlights an uncomfortable truth for New Hampshire Democrats. We'll bring in the political strategist who is making that argument. And also ahead, actor Tom Hiddleston will join us with a preview of his new, modern take on one of Shakespeare's classic comedies.

That's next here on Morning, Joe. A classic Shakespeare plays coming to Broadway this fall, led by an all-star cast. The iconic romantic comedy, much ado about nothing, will bring together Tony Award nominee and Golden Globe Award winner Tom Hidleston and three-time Olivier Award nominee, Haley, Atwell. as the pair of reluctant lovers. Directed by Tony Award-winning director, Jamie Lloyd, the production's record-breaking run in London was described by reviewers as brilliantly inventive, hilarious, and the number one best show of the year.

Is that all? And Tom, Haley, and Jamie, join us now. Thank you so much for being with us. Tom, starting with you. So this was the production. Was it over in London? That's right. Smashing reviews there.

What are the sort of challenges, opportunities, fears, hopes, dreams of bringing it over the side of the back? No fears. No fears, only dreams. I love this play and I love this production. I loved making it with Haley and Jamie. It's one of my favorite plays always has been. It's one of Shakespeare's warmest, funniest and most deeply romantic comedies. It's genuinely funny. And as we rehearsed it, we found that there were these 400-year-old jokes that still stand the test of time. And our production is unique to us, I think,

because it's full of energy and full of music. And it's about two people who are witty and charming and the life and soul of the party. But they use that wit as a defense. And they have to drop that defense and be open to love.

And they find love a little later. And it's been staring him in the face the whole time. So, Haley, your Broadway debut. It is. Why do you think, to Tom's point just a moment ago, why do you think this still resonates hundreds of years after it's written? Well, I think when Shakespeare's done as intended, it's for the people. It's not an intellectual academic exercise for people who have studied this play at school. It's embodied in the body, mind and spirit.

The soul of these plays taps upon something, I think, very human. And to Tom's point, talking about the very complicated way. that people try to connect with each other and the failings when they try to communicate and all the strange ways that they try and protect themselves from pain and from hurt. That feels very human. That feels like it's going to,

it stands the test of time. And then I think Shakespeare's sort of meant to be updated in a way of being accessible to modern day audiences. So you can see from the footage, this is not corsets and hey, nony-nony, dance is something quite different and unexpected. And also in the play I should just say the play the play as written by Shakespeare opens with a party. The most high status figure invites the entire company to a party and that's what we stage and it's a party at which people dance

and celebrate and fall in love and fall over and fall out of love and propose marriage wedding engagements and then somebody gets upset and has to be brought back from the brink. And then there's a second wind and then there's more party. And so what we've done is we've just staged a party with Shakespeare's play inside it. And the audience is welcome. So so much of what has really resonated in Broadway has new fresh inventive has Jamie Lloyd behind it, whether it's Avita or Sunset Boulevard and the like. I've struck with the word updated.

So talk to us about the vision here you wanted to present for this production. Well, it's like they're both saying. It's a huge party. It's tether to the text. So Shakespeare says that. And of course, at a big kind of family event of any kind of people kind of maybe get a little carried away. Maybe they drink a little bit too much. Maybe they eat a little too much. And that means emotions run high, which is amazing. So of course, there's a lot of joy and there's a lot of celebration. But also the next day, of course, we've all experienced the worst hangover of our lives. And that's when some of the tension, can rise to the surface. So it makes so much sense in terms of the kind of dramaturgy of the piece. So they're kind of the approach to it, as they're saying, is this huge dance party that kind of goes a little wrong and then ends very, very happily. And it's a kind of a chance to lift everyone's spirits and have a really amazing time. And the whole sort of process of like inventing the production is really working with our designer Sutra Gilmore, who's worked,

you know, with me for 20 or years. It's kind of about creating a playground for the most amazing artists that you could ever dream to work with to kind of have a lot of fun and explore the text and kind of connect with the audience. A lot of it's about kind of getting out of the way of the connection between the people on the stage and the people in the auditorium. So there's a kind of direct communication. So these guys often talk directly to people in the audience and have that very clear kind of interaction. And sometimes the audience is incredibly vocal. which is amazing, and especially in New York. You know, as we know, New York audiences. Not shy. Not shy in any way. They weren't that shy in London either, though. That's true.

So New York, New Yorkers, you've got a challenge. If it was like that in London, I don't know what it's going to be like in New York. It's going to be electric. Well, I think the New York Times in their description here does, frankly, a pretty good job of selling this. They say it has sights and sounds of a 90s party with, I like this, house music, headdresses, and hedonism with some pink confetti. There's a lot of pink and fessies. How many pieces we counted, there was something like 5,000 pieces of pink confetti. It's, it's, do you know what, the total across the run in London was something like the weight of a, of a male giraffe.

I don't know why anyone says that it's the male giraffe, why they use that as a kind of metric. I have no idea, but that is, it's a sheet. It's like tons of confetti. I found it all over my house. Yeah, it was all over. It was in my dog's fur at point. It was in my kitchen. Get everywhere.

Your breakfast cereal. Yeah. So as a question for both of you as actors, the language of Shakespeare, of course. So famous, so iconic. What is, how do you address it? How do you engage with it? How do you grapple with it? How do you dance with it to make it work today?

Honestly, that's the joy of it. There's the joy of it for us. It's a joy of it for me. There are lines in this play. I do think it's, it's Shakespeare's almost purest play about love. I think the title is a joke. I think actually it's put much to do about. everything. I think it the center of this play is the redemptive healing, opening, deepening

power of being in love and accepting love, falling in love, as, as Beatrice and Bandick do. And the poetry in this play about love is as contemporary as, as any pop song that you would hear today or any piece of lyrics you hear to say. The Broadway production of Much Addo About Nothing begins previews on Saturday, October 31st at the Winter Garden Theater and New York City. It's a 10-week limited run. You will want to see this. Actors Tom Hiddleston and Haley Atwell, director Jamie Lloyd, our thanks to all of you very much. And I'll be right back with more. Morning Joe. Welcome back. As we approach November's midterm elections, a new podcast featuring some familiar faces as helping listeners get up to speed.

Still counting, reunites Nate Silver, Claire Malone and Galen Drook, formerly of the 538 fame for a new show. now under the umbrella of Crooked Media. The team says they aim to cut through the noise with fact-based reporting to help listeners better understand the political landscape ahead of the midterms and beyond. And Nate, Silver, joins us now. Thank you. This Republican strategist and MSNs now political analyst Susan Dil Persio. Our thanks to you both for being here, Nate, you are reentering the fray.

You've never accident. I've never exited. I've never exited. I like the fray. You never fully exit into the frame, but you're back in a big way. So talk to us about why now seem the right moment to get the band back together, if you will, and tell us more about the podcast. Well, first of all, I'm great friends with Claire and Galen.

So we're in real life friends. We hope the energy will come through on still counting. But also, yeah, there is more and more information that people find hard to digest, right? You have polls, you have prediction markets. You have a lot of overconfidence, really, about political narratives and things like that. And so to have practitioners who have some experience who are nonpartisan, We have opinions. We have very strong opinions. We swear on that show. We don't swear on morning TV. Well, like, but we know the material really well, and we know how to cut through the BS.

So you obviously gained an extraordinary amount of fame and in some quarters notoriety. With your numbers-based, data-driven approach to politics. So you say you have some opinions, you have some takes. So let's hear where do you think things stand right now? We are, as you sat down, we're talking about, we're in the stretch run now. And late Labor Day and an early election day, this is, We're only 50 days in change until Election Day. Talk to us about where you see the midterms. So both history and current year indicators would point in the same direction, which is it's probably going to be a blue year.

We remember what happened in 2018. In the last midterm, President Trump's approval rating is in the 38% range, disapproval, 58, 59%. The history of the President's party in the midterms, particularly in second terms or lame duck terms, is not very appetizing for Trump. On the other hand, Democrats have to win four seats in the Senate. which are in very red territory. When we run these simulations every day, 40,000, it literally comes out to almost 50-50 in the Senate. The House has certainly lean or maybe even likely Democratic.

There is a GOP redistricting edge. If it's close, the GOP will win the toss-up races right now, based on the generic ballot, which is how people want to vote for Congress, based on individual races. You definitely take the Democratic side in the House and probably not bet either way on the Senate. It's actually tightened a little bit further in our forecast recently. Susan, you know, the president, you know, facing that political landscape has made his own bet, and that's to bet on himself and make himself the story here for the GOP heading into November. There are some in his own party who privately aren't sure that's necessarily a great idea. But his thinking is, put me the center of the ad campaigns.

Hey, I'll be on the road a lot. We'll see. And we've got this midterm conventions kicking off tonight in Dallas. Yeah, we do. And I think it would be a mistake to think that this convention, or the ads or anything else that we see Donald Trump does, has anything to do with helping anybody else. This is just about Trump. This convention is so he can have two days of pageantry for himself because 2028 won't be about him. He wants to see all the pomp and circumstance.

He loves seeing himself on broadcast TV. If he was trying to help candidates where he could is use a scalpel and do very targeted social media campaigns and other things to get. get out his voters because they do know how to reach them directly. But that's not what he's going to do. And I guess, Nate, my question to you is with his numbers right now in the mid to high 30s, like, is that just all baked in when we start looking at what kind of year, especially for the House we're going to have? Like, can Donald Trump do anything that changes that even more with his numbers? Well, maybe the polls are wrong again. We have to account for that possibility. But no, decisions he made early in this term are very baked in now. Going to war with Iran when he promised

no more Middle East wars, lower gas prices, the tariff stuff, right? Endorsing Ken Paxton in Texas, which makes that a toss-up instead of a lean-R race. You can't undo any of that stuff. I don't know why he's having this tonight opposite the NFL. I'll be watching the NFL. I promise you. But yeah, he wants to take himself out of the spotlight. Maybe these fringy races, maybe like, you know, Kansas is close in some polls. I don't really buy that that much because I think Trump can get enough the Republican vote out there. They haven't voted for a Republican Democratic center since 1932, I think. Yeah. But yeah, Trump should take a back seat and he's, you know, as impressive as it's been for him to win two out of three elections when people thought it was impossible.

Republicans have not done well in midterms under Trump. They haven't done well in special elections. When he himself is not on the ballot, he lacks that that magic. The polls are more accurate in those years, too, right? Without this Trump effect, the polls have been pretty true. In New Jersey and Virginia last year, they underrated Democrats, in fact. So, Nate, give us one Senate race in particular you're eyeing at. We'll wake up the morning after election A to be surprised. I mean, Alaska is the one that practitioners are interested in.

Mary Peltola actually won, I think one or two terms to the U.S. House. She's quite moderate. You have ranked choice voting, which gets quite complicated, but might help her as more of a consensus, moderate choice. Yeah, if Democrats win Alaska, one more. The one more might be Ohio. It might be Texas. But you can't, you know, we won't know Alaska until five or six in the morning, Eastern time or the next day. But that's the most fun race for sure. So Susan, we've, the primary season officially wrapped up with New Hampshire. I know you've been thinking about New Hampshire. Give us some of your quick takeaways,

including the role the DSA made in play. Well, I think the DSA has made a statement in this whole election cycle. And make no mistake about it, they are probably the greatest winners of this election cycle when it comes to. where they go where their future lies because they have been able to motivate voters. And they have done an excellent job. They also motivated in New Hampshire. And they didn't have the National Party behind them as much. So maybe that's why we didn't see that candidate do as well.

But at the end of the day, the DSA candidate still has refused to endorse the winner of that primary Chris Poppice. And I think that is significant because that means she's going to hold Pappas accountable through the next 50, some odd days, instead of just letting him run against John Sununu, which I think is the race that people are going to wake up and be surprised about in November, that all of a sudden, New Hampshire, flipped red. Yeah, the two races, the Dems seem to be most nervous about in terms of Michigan, New Hampshire, are the two there. But certainly Republicans, there's a number of states suddenly in play that a few months ago,

they wouldn't have thought so. So much to talk about. And it's a good thing we've got a new podcast to help us think about it. The first episode of that new podcast, still counting, drops to you. this evening with new episodes coming every Wednesday on YouTube.com slash at Still Counting Podcast or just get it wherever you get your podcast. Co-host Nate Silver, Nate, congrats, good to see you. Thank you for being here.

MSNalPy. Thank you so much. MS. Now political analyst, Susan Delpercio. Thank you as well. And we'll be right back with some more. Morning Joe. Tomorrow on Morning Joe, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be our guest. We'll get her reflections on where the country stands 25 years after the September 11th terrorist attacks. She, of course, was Senator from New York that fateful day. That does it for us this morning. We will indeed see you tomorrow at 6am Eastern for another morning, Joe. Money, power,

politics with Stephanie Ruhl is up next here on MS now after a short final break. See you tomorrow.