Michael Barbaro: From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This [music] is The Daily.

Michael Barbaro: Today, the implosion of Graham Platner's [music] campaign for US Senate, the battle over who should replace him on the ballot, and the identity [music] crisis it has laid bare inside the Democratic Party. I spoke with two of my colleagues, national political correspondents [music] Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher.

Michael Barbaro: It's Wednesday, July 8th. [music] Lisa and Shane, thank you for making time in the middle of a very big, very live story.

Lisa Lerer: Thanks for having us.

Shane Goldmacher: Yeah, thank you.

Michael Barbaro: We are talking to you around 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and I want to let listeners know exactly when we're talking because this is a story that's changing a lot hour by hour. But at this very moment, it pretty much appears that it's a question of when rather than if Graham Platner ends his Democratic campaign for US Senate in Maine, which is a race and a seat that could determine the overall control of the entire Senate this fall, which obviously has all kinds of implications, including the fate of President Trump's agenda for the rest of his second term. Do I have that when not if calculation correct?

Shane Goldmacher: That seems exactly right at this point. There are basically no major Democratic individuals or groups that are still actively supporting Graham Platner. There's been nobody who has spoken up for him since this allegation, and in fact, the people most supportive of him, probably most notably including Bernie Sanders, today came out and said, "It's time for him to step aside."

Michael Barbaro: Just catalog for me, Lisa, some of the people who have in the past day or so told Garam Platner, "It's over."

Lisa Lerer: We're talking about everybody from the main Democratic Party to the head of the state Senate in Maine to their gubernatorial nominee to Senator Chuck Schumer, who's the head of Democrats in the Senate, to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who controls the Senate Campaign Committee, to Zakary Mondaine, to Elizabeth Warren. So, this was a sentiment that really went across a party that really doesn't agree on all that much when it comes to strategy or policy, but on this one issue that Garam Platner has to go, everyone seemed to agree.

Shane Goldmacher: And it wasn't just all the people, it was the money. The groups that control the money that was been reserved in ads in this race said, "No more money for Garam Platner if he is still the nominee." And if there's no money, there's no competing against Susan Collins who has tens of millions of dollars reserved already.

Michael Barbaro: Okay, Lisa, let's talk about how the Platner campaign reached this crisis point. And you know this story almost better than anyone because a few weeks back, you and Katie Glueck came on the show to talk about the reporting you both did that in many ways started this all. You were looking at the allegations about Platner's treatment of women. You had spoken with several of his former girlfriends. That story has since evolved and gotten us, I think, to this moment.

Lisa Lerer: Right. So, we had spoken to six women who had previously been in relationships with Garam Platner. Three of them described unsettling incidents that at times felt physically violent or menacing towards them. One of those women who we had spoken to, a woman named Jenny Rascico, who is a Democrat who lives in Maine, after we spoke to her, she came forward with much more explosive allegations.

Michael Barbaro: Which were what?

Lisa Lerer: Basically, in interviews both with Politico and then CNN, she said that Graham Plater sexually assaulted her.

Lisa Lerer: Um, it was at the end of 2021.

Lisa Lerer: She says that they were in a relationship for 2 years or so, on and off.

Jenny Rascico: It was a night where him and I were texting back and forth, and he had taken something that I said as as an invitation. And I said, "No, don't come over." Like half an hour later, I heard a noise outside my door. And um then he he came in.

Lisa Lerer: He came over uninvited, let himself into her house.

Jenny Rascico: As I was laying on the couch, it was probably pretty late at night, and I was getting I was already ready for bed. I just wasn't in bed. And I looked at him, and I remember this very specific look in his eyes. And I could smell alcohol, and I was like,

Lisa Lerer: "This is different. He is heavily intoxicated."

Lisa Lerer: And she said he started climbing on top of her and trying to be intimate with her.

Jenny Rascico: And I remember [music] just at first being like, "Hey, I'm not into this. Like, don't I'm not in the mood. Like,

Jenny Rascico: don't."

Lisa Lerer: She says that she told him to stop and said no, no, but he kept going.

Michael Barbaro: Is there any way that he thought this was consensual or no? Just because

Jenny Rascico: I don't believe that you can think that that scenario was consensual. I mean, when somebody in the middle of it says, "Don't touch me." Like,

Michael Barbaro: Yeah.

Jenny Rascico: that's obviously not consensual.

Michael Barbaro: She claims he raped her.

Lisa Lerer: She claims he raped her. And you know, when she spoke to us earlier, she had described on the record what she called reckless and unsettling behavior by Graham Plater. But she also spoke to us off the record, and we honored that agreement. She has since told Politico and later CNN that she didn't go public with the specific assault at the time because she didn't want to be known as a rape victim.

Michael Barbaro: Lisa, what has Garamond Planter said about this specific allegation?

Lisa Lerer: Well, he released a video.

Graham Platner: I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me.

Lisa Lerer: And he denied that this sexual encounter was non-consensual.

Graham Platner: Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false.

Lisa Lerer: He didn't deny the encounter itself, just that it basically that it wasn't assault. But he did also acknowledge the potential political implications of this.

Graham Platner: Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.

Lisa Lerer: And he said that he was taking a step back from his campaign to reflect, which then of course prompted the deluge of calls.

Michael Barbaro: Right. But Shane, it did not prompt at least this hour him to leave the race. So as the entire party abandoned him and said, "Your campaign is over." What have the conversations been like inside the Planter campaign?

Shane Goldmacher: I think you have to put in context all the other things that Garamond Planter has survived so far, which is the accusation that he knowingly had a Nazi tattoo, a tattoo he has since had covered up, all of the Reddit posts that came out that would in normal circumstances potentially sink a candidate and even the previous questions about his relationships with women. And yet, he won the Democratic primary. So, yes, he said he was going to take time to reflect and both Lisa and I have done reporting that shows that he seems to be aware of the political reality around him, but the campaign's discussions are about shaping the field after his exit.

Michael Barbaro: Meaning what?

Shane Goldmacher: Making sure that somebody who is aligned with his ideological movement becomes the nominee, that the Democratic Party doesn't pick an insider who is opposed to his view that was aligned with Bernie Sanders and the sort of left-wing ideology that he was pushing to have an expansive view of government to help the working class. So, despite being engulfed in this scandal, he wants to play a big role in picking his replacement. Is that right? And is that a reasonable request?

Lisa Lerer: Well, he and his team believe they have leverage in this race. Their argument is that they were turning out thousands of Maine voters to these town hall meetings that he was having all over the state, that they really energized the base of the Democratic Party behind their bid, and that to win a general election, no matter who the Democratic nominee is, Democrats in Maine will need those people.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Lisa Lerer: But, you know, it's an open question over how much leverage he really has. Like, do Maine Democrats want to be taking advice from someone who left them in this position?

Michael Barbaro: Shane, how exactly is this going to work? Assuming that Graham Plater does in fact leave the race, how is his replacement chosen? And what role would he play in that, exactly?

Shane Goldmacher: I mean, yeah, I don't think you can talk about this without describing the timing, which is the Democratic Party and Graham Plater have 1 week to get him off the ballot because there's this hard deadline of July 13th for him to withdraw and be replaced on the ballot by a different Democrat. And it is a pretty audacious thing to say, "I'm being accused of rape and I'm going to try to shape my successor in this race." But to the extent that he does have leverage, it's because of this deadline. Because until then, he's the nominee and if he doesn't get out, he will remain the nominee.

Shane Goldmacher: Because he could in theory just sit there, not drop out, and make life very, very miserable for the Democratic Party. But let's just play with the idea that the party is going to maybe be in conversation with him and find some mutually agreeable way of picking his successor. What might that look like?

Lisa Lerer: Look, one of his concerns that I think is shared more broadly across the Democratic Party is the specter of the Biden-Harris replacement. That is major scar tissue in the Democratic psyche among consultants, among elected officials, among voters. How that process played out has left a lingering sense of distrust in the party that's, you know, really pervaded into the race we're in now. And so I think there is a real awareness of wanting to have main voters and really Democratic voters across the country feel that his successor was chosen by some form of democratic process.

Shane Goldmacher: Because when Biden yielded to Harris, there was no role for Democratic voters. It was kind of a smoky backroom situation.

Lisa Lerer: It was kind of a smoky backroom situation. You know, people came out and they endorsed Harris very, very quickly and she just sort of became the new nominee. And I think that just left a lot of concern and a lot of mistrust in the party and it's part of the reason the party has struggled still to this day with, you know, negative views of their brand, which, you know, as our poll showed last month, could potentially hurt them in these midterms.

Shane Goldmacher: Quite arguably, it's one of the reasons why someone like Garam Platner did so well in this race to begin with. There's so much residual distrust of the Democratic establishment.

Lisa Lerer: Yeah. Let's wonk out in Maine like 1 minute, which is there were two races that national Democrats tried to intervene in in Maine this year. One was Garam Platner's race where the party apparatus backed the two-term governor Janet Mills, whose campaign got so little traction she dropped out a month before the primary. There was a second race also, which is the key House seat in Maine, where again national Democrats picked a favored candidate. They intervened, tried to support this person, and that candidate also lost an important Democratic primary. So, the voters of Maine have shown they are unhappy with getting kinds of directions from national Democratic leaders. And Platner and people around Platner see him as a part of that movement. Even if he is gone, they want that somehow to live on. The challenge is given who he is at this moment, is his presence in negotiating that helpful to finding another person? That's not at all clear.

Shane Goldmacher: And there's another challenge, too, that Garam Platner, as we said, has to be out of the race by July 13th. Someone else needs to be the nominee by July 27th. There's not a lot of time, and it's totally unclear how you get from where we are now to where the party needs to end up at by the 27th of July.

Michael Barbaro: That's not a lot of time.

Lisa Lerer: Right. And let's keep in mind, we are less than 4 months away from election day. So, this is a moment in any midterm race where literally every single day matters. So, they're also sort of costing themselves political momentum, political opportunity in a way for every single day the party does not have a a nominee in this crucial, crucial Senate race.

Michael Barbaro: some of the ideas being kicked around for a process of picking Plater's successor that would avoid a Biden-Harris kind of scenario so far?

Shane Goldmacher: Yeah, there are a bunch of things. Two that I've heard the most about. One is coming up with some kind of convention where you would select delegates and those delegates would then pick the nominee. Another is having a statewide caucus where everybody, actual people can go vote to

Michael Barbaro: primary?

Shane Goldmacher: Like a basically another primary but hosted by the state.

Michael Barbaro: of the summer?

Shane Goldmacher: In the middle of the summer. As those discussions are happening, what we're seeing is the fissures inside the Democratic

Michael Barbaro: Right.

Lisa Lerer: Yeah, [music] and our listeners can't see us, of course, but I was shaking my head a little bit when Shane was talking. Just because I think it's important for people to understand things like caucuses and conventions. These are things that parties spend months, if not years, planning how they're going to execute in a way that is credible.

Shane Goldmacher: And they can still be a mess. We were at Iowa when there was a mess.

Lisa Lerer: But it's a way that it's effective, that ends up with an election result that everyone feels like they can trust. And now this Maine Democratic Party has to do this

Shane Goldmacher: in 2 weeks.

Lisa Lerer: in 2 weeks.

Michael Barbaro: Yeah.

Shane Goldmacher: And they

Michael Barbaro: Kind of an insane proposition.

Lisa Lerer: It's an insane proposition and they can't even really launch full bore into it because Platner has not pulled himself off the ballot yet.

Michael Barbaro: We're back. Shane, once we figure out how a replacement for Glenn Platner is theoretically chosen and assuming he drops out, who are the people who might replace him? Who are raising their hands? Is there a frontrunner? Who might be the next Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine?

Shane Goldmacher: We definitely do not yet have a frontrunner. We definitely have a lot of people raising their hands or saying I'm fielding phone calls. Sort of leading the field is three candidates who ran for governor in Maine this year, all of whom lost that primary. Troy Jackson, who had Bernie Sanders' endorsement in the primary. You have Nirav Shah, who is a Maine public health official, who actually finished second in the primary. And then you have Shenna Bellows, who is the Secretary of State, all of whom could conceivably run. You have the Platner world sort of thinking about other allies like a state representative. Then you have the people who were in the Senate race who exited when it became clear it was Platner versus Mills. A brewery owner named Dan Kleban, who had declared and then exited the race. Jordan Wood, who had run for Senate, then ran for House, lost the House race.

Michael Barbaro: See, I'm just going to interrupt to say cuz this is a lot of names, Joe. These do not seem like household names who would catch fire in a few weeks.

Shane Goldmacher: Well, there is one household name, Michael Patrick Dempsey. McDreamy. The actor, the pride of Maine, is on the list. You know, I'm not sure how serious that bit is at all, although he was tossed about in one of these polls that was sent out to Maine voters at one point, but I think that his inclusion really gives you a sense of where the state of things are.

Michael Barbaro: Chaotic.

Shane Goldmacher: Chaotic, yes.

Michael Barbaro: Okay. Is it possible the state's governor, Democrat Janet Mills, who was seen by the establishment as the logical person to have beaten Grand Platner, she didn't, she might just suddenly become the nominee.

Shane Goldmacher: I mean, there's always a chance, but I think it's a pretty hard case to make given that she exited the race because she said she couldn't raise enough money, she wasn't making any traction in the polls, and didn't even make it to primary day.

Lisa Lerer: She's come up in precisely zero of the phone calls that I've had with people about who is likeliest to replace Platner at this point.

Michael Barbaro: Okay. Given the turmoil on the Democratic side of this race now, and the reality that Susan Collins has been the United States Senator in Maine for a very long time, how should we think about both sides odds in this race, and how they have just changed in the last few days?

Shane Goldmacher: So right now, it's a total disastrous mess for Democrats, but there is a silver lining that a lot of Democrats are seeing, which is that Grand Platner, before this scandal, was looking like a wounded candidate. The New York Times just did a series of polls in all of the key Senate battleground states that Democrats are trying to flip to take the majority, and Platner scored worse than all the other Democrats on some of the most important questions of character, whether you were the right moral values to be a leader, and Susan Collins was among the highest scoring people. And so, there are a lot of Democrats saying, "Hey, this might be messy now, but we have a chance for a fresh start in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, a state that leans Democratic. You don't need a movement leader like Grand Platner, somebody who has a particular charisma. You might just need a Joe Schmo generic Democrat can beat Susan Collins. Now, that might be a little ambitious given how many races Susan Collins has won. She's beaten an awful lot of Democrats in the past, in good years for Democrats, in bad years for Democrats, but this does not look like a good year for the Republican Party, and the Democrats are excited about the possibility of starting over at this point.

Lisa Lerer: Yeah, and I think one way to assess that is how Republicans are feeling, and Republicans are feeling fairly disappointed by this outcome, at least in private conversations, because they felt that they had a Kanzay in Grand Planter, who was extremely flawed. One Republican group spent $9 million uh of since the end of April running ads defining him as uh bigoted and violent and too risky for the state. So, they were charging into this general election defining Planter as unfit for office, and now they're going to get some new person, and they certainly will have to do all the research to figure out who this person is and figure out how to define them in a way that works for Republicans in a very, very short period of time. And I think it's also important to remember in these conversations that Senator Collins has plenty of her own vulnerabilities, and there's two that stood out quite strongly in our polling. One is her age. She's 73 years old at a time when we know voters are very, very eager for generational change, change in Washington. She's running for a sixth term. And also, she is aligned with the Republican Party, and she's, you know, been an unpopular president. An unpopular president who she has, for all her sort of moderate maverick reputation, she has voted with the vast majority of the time, and she's in a national political environment that is quite bad for Republicans. Not only is there an unpopular president, there is an unpopular war, and people are really, really anxious about the economy.

Michael Barbaro: Which she did vote against via the War Powers Resolution. But Shane, is it right to think of Collins as weak and as Republicans not looking forward to having to pivot from making a case against Platner to suddenly making an affirmative case for Susan Collins?

Shane Goldmacher: I think that the Republican brand in Maine is weak. I don't think that there's evidence that Susan Collins herself is as weak. In that poll, we asked voters "How do you feel about President Trump handling the cost of living issue?" Which is for so many voters the defining issue of this moment. His approval rating was 31%. So if you are running and you're Susan Collins, you're going to need to win a huge chunk of voters who think the president is blowing the issue most important to them. So I do think the president creates deep vulnerabilities for her in that state.

Michael Barbaro: Lisa, just remind us of where this Maine Senate race fits into the national Senate map. And let's presume for a minute that this race gets a little bit challenging for Democrats to win despite what Shane just said, and maybe they don't win the Maine Senate race. Let's just take Maine off the map. Can Democrats win back the Senate without it?

Lisa Lerer: It's not impossible, but it's very very hard. To win control of the Senate, Democrats must retain all the states they currently hold and flip four Republican-held seats.

Michael Barbaro: No simple task.

Lisa Lerer: No simple task. There are six battleground states that both sides are looking at. Of those six battleground states, only two are held by Republicans. One is Colorado, and the other is Maine. So if you take Maine off the map, it means you have to hold onto all of your own battleground states and flip seats in places that are traditionally very Republican and much less friendly to Democrats.

Shane Goldmacher: Yeah, I mean, the task is just really hard. And four of those six battleground states are places that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more. Democrats don't hold any seats in the entire United States Senate that look like that. So, the idea they're going to flip two or three of them is really, really tough.

Michael Barbaro: I think it's fair to say that the situation that Platner has created in Maine was the Democratic establishment's worst fear. They articulated it over the last year, over and over again, as they made the case against Grant Platner as the nominee in Maine. They felt it was a winnable seat with a deeply flawed candidate. They fought it at every turn. And it came to embody this tension we keep talking about on the show between the establishment and the insurgent left. And at times it has felt like the Democratic establishment has felt wise in its conclusions about Maine, and there have been times it felt like they were completely wrong. They were wrong to assume that Platner couldn't win. And then they were right to have intuited that he was a flawed candidate. Ultimately, is this a vindication, what's happened in Maine, for the Democratic establishment, or not?

Lisa Lerer: I don't think there are any winners right now in this process, right?

Shane Goldmacher: vindicated.

Lisa Lerer: No one is vindicated. The Democratic establishment had originally recruited Janet Mills, the state's two-term governor, but she would have been the oldest freshman senator in American history right after Joe Biden's age was the central issue of the 2024 campaign, and that was just a mismatch for where voters are. How this plays out going forward, there could be some winners, right? But they have to navigate the very ideological divides that are tearing at the party in this really compressed time period to find somebody who can continue to keep the real grassroots motivation and momentum that built up Gran Platinar and not turn off the rest of the voters.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Shane Goldmacher: And in August we're going to have a Michigan primary where these same forces will clash up against each other again. You have a candidate Haley Stevens who's preferred by Schumer going up against Abdul El Sayed who is backed by some of the same strategists that backed Gran Platinar. So the party will go through another round of this. You know, shortly after they navigate through this main mess.

Michael Barbaro: Is it possible or likely even that the leaders of the Democratic Party play it really safe and not embrace all this insurgent energy at a time when Democratic Socialists are ousting incumbents in New York and winning in Colorado and the most successful strategy and you've both documented it is to run against the Democratic Party brand in order to represent the Democratic Party brand?

Lisa Lerer: I mean the Democratic Party brand is in crisis. I've been talking with a bunch of Democrats in recent weeks just to put in perspective how big a deal it was that Platinar became the nominee and how important it would be if Abdul El Sayed was the nominee in Michigan. The party establishment basically hasn't lost a competitive Senate primary in 10 or 15 years. Like Chuck Schumer and the DSCC have picked these candidates in basically every competitive race. And these are the first instances where voters have come and said, "You know what? Not so much. We don't like that. We want to try something different." And the party is not sure how to deal with this. This is a new phenomenon. We've seen this in the Republican Party where the voters rejected the leadership following Trump. But like this is new for the Democrats and so they're just a steep learning curve cuz it is all so new.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm. It also feels like there's a very important lesson here for running against the Democratic brand and that's about the value of vetting and the tradition of evaluating candidates the establishment has put an emphasis on for a very long time. As you both know, there's a group of political consultants who took some measure of pride in bucking that set of protocols and traditions when they found Graham Platner. And I wonder if they now second-guess the pride they took in bypassing some of that traditional vetting.

Lisa Lerer: Look, I I think there was a desire in Democratic circles to find candidates who had {quote} and {unquote} authenticity. That was the big buzzword. But authenticity comes with authentic problems and missteps and mistakes. I think the people involved in Graham Platner's race felt that voters would like a narrative of someone sort of pushing through adversity, cleaning up their life, finding a new path forward. And I think voters do like those kinds of stories. Everybody likes those kinds of stories. But the question is how much of their past will voters say is acceptable at least when it comes to Democratic candidates?

Michael Barbaro: Well, of course authenticity doesn't always come with flaws. Certainly doesn't always come with an accusation of that serious nature. I suspect that as humbled as some of the strategists are who recruited Graham Platner, they still would like the party to trust their overall instinct that fighters are required in this moment, that agitators are the future of this party, and that Graham Platner very successfully challenged that in a way that his flaws aside may still want to be a model for the party.

Shane Goldmacher: I think there is something to that. I think Democrats are looking for people who are willing to fight, and I think there's a pervasive sense among the party's base that Democrats haven't stood up in the past strong enough to Trump and haven't spoken out strong enough for their values. But the issue is finding people who meet their criteria of authenticity, of fighting, but also can be electable by a general electorate in battleground states. It's a challenge.

Lisa Lerer: I think there's a push to find fighters of the political system, not just of Republicans, but

Shane Goldmacher: saying everything that has kept you economically where you are needs to be overturned. I'm not just going to fight Donald Trump. I'm going to fight to overturn the oligarchs, as Bernie Sanders likes to say, or the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party donors, or the corporate class, right? It's picking villains and fighting those villains and making it not just Trump. The criticism from the left is that too many of the sort of squishy middle say they're going to be big fighters and they would just want to fight Donald Trump, but they don't want to fight other powers that are holding you back.

Lisa Lerer: And Platner very much framed his candidacy from the start as a fight not just against Trump, but against Democrats. [music] And it's that energy that is very hard for the Democratic Party establishment to pull in

Shane Goldmacher: because it's energy against them.

Michael Barbaro: Right.

Michael Barbaro: Well, Shane, Lisa, thank you both very much. Appreciate it.

Lisa Lerer: Thank you.

Shane Goldmacher: Thanks.

Caitlyn O'Keefe: Hi, Caitlyn.

Carolyn (Voter): Hi, Carolyn. How are you?

Carolyn (Voter): Oh, sad.

Caitlyn O'Keefe: Yeah.

Carolyn (Voter): Yeah. We're just sad. Yesterday afternoon, they were reporting it and so at 4:30, I was out there pulling up my lawn sign and just you know, heartbroken.

Michael Barbaro: On Tuesday, Daily Producer Kaylin O'Keefe spoke with Democratic voters in Maine, many of them once passionate supporters of Graham Plater, about the latest allegation against him and the growing calls for him to drop out of the race.

Voter: I went, "Oh, shit." It's just beyond frustrating. I don't [music] need my politicians to be perfect. As a matter of fact, I'd prefer they'd be imperfect, but it's like, you know, Graham, really? Really?

Voter: That's awful. [music] The details of the sexual assault feel horrendous.

Voter: I just could have sat down and cried.

Voter: I feel a little disgusted with it all. Like, I'm annoyed [clears throat] that there's another dude who is in line to become a leader and we're dealing with this again.

Voter: Whether it's true or false, I think he has to withdraw.

Voter: Clearly, he has to drop out.

Voter: I absolutely think that he needs to drop out. He'd be better [music] off with another candidate.

Caitlyn O'Keefe: If he does drop out, what do you want to see [music] in a replacement for Plater?

Voter: The replacement for Plater has to have a similar progressive,

Voter: done with the establishment vibe. Class consciousness,

Voter: Medicare for all, whole kitten caboodle.

Voter: Honesty.

Voter: [laughter]

Voter: Honesty and a clean background. You know what I'm saying?

Voter: I just want a politician that I can trust and that has [music] integrity.

Voter: You don't have to make this like Carhartt man [music] appear as our savior.

Voter: I think the main Democratic Party has to be very, very careful [music] with how and who they choose to replace him. There are fully confident people [music] out there, but they don't have his charisma. Who Who has it?

Voter: Is there someone that I don't know about? I truly have no idea of who could step into this role.

Voter: We just need somebody. We need some hope someplace.

Michael Barbaro: We'll be right back.

Michael Barbaro: Here's what else you need [music] to know today. In the latest challenge to a shaky ceasefire, Iran attacked three commercial ships, and the United States responded by carrying out air strikes against several Iranian military targets,

Michael Barbaro: and by revoking Iran's right to sell oil on the open market. The tit-for-tat attacks demonstrated the challenge of restoring both [music] peace and pre-war levels of trade in the region.

Michael Barbaro: And in France, a court has upheld [music] the conviction of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen on charges of embezzlement, but in a major victory for Le Pen, the court lifted a ban on her ability to run for office. Hours later, Le Pen announced her candidacy [music] for the French presidency in 2027, her fourth bid for the office, Le Pen has gotten closer to victory [music] in each of her last three campaigns. Today's episode [music] was produced by Claire Tennis Getter, Shannon Lin, and Caitlin O'Keefe with help from Jack Disidoro. [music] It was edited by Rachel Quester, Paige Cowan, and Liz O'Baylen and contains [music] music by Alicia Eubanks and Marion Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Michael Barbaro: That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.