Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner Share a Strategist Who Wants to Overhaul the Democrats, With Beer and Zyn and True Belief

Morris Katz is steering one campaign on the cusp of victory, and another, beset by scandal.

Zohran Mamdani and Morris Katz.Courtesy of Morriz Katz

It was just past midnight on a mid-October Friday, and Morris Katz was sprawled out on the floor of his firm’s office in downtown Brooklyn, a warm six-pack of Bud Light within easy reach. Katz could not be blamed for needing a drink.

Here in New York, things were going pretty well. Katz, as Zohran Mamdani’s top adviser, was on the verge of completing an astonishing victory—though Andrew Cuomo was ratcheting up his fear-mongering attacks and the pressure to avoid mistakes was building as Election Day approached.

Up in Maine, however, the chaos was escalating. Katz’s client in the US Senate race, Graham Platner, was confronting damaging daily revelations about old Reddit posts where Platner had declared himself a communist, labeled cops “opportunistic cowards,” seemed to blame rape victims for their plight, and asked why Black people “don’t tip.” Then there was the tattoo on Platner’s chest. Katz was trying to determine how to handle questions about whether it was a Nazi symbol, and hoping it wasn’t—not the kind of issue you generally want to be wrestling with during a political campaign.

He looked at a monitor, reviewing and approving a new set of Mamdani ads. Then Katz talked through a statement he was writing for Platner’s campaign, in response to the uproar over the old posts, trying out a line about the “importance of a party that’s open to redemption.” Katz, a 26-year-old with a head of tight blond curls and a rapid-fire tongue, was remarkably calm. Maybe that poise flows from Katz’s prevailing focus on remaking the Democratic Party. Or maybe it comes from Katz balancing the beer drinking with a steady diet of Zyn menthol ice nicotine pouches.

U.S. senatorial candidate from Maine Graham Platner speaks at a town hall at the Leavitt Theater on October 22, 2025 in Ogunquit, Maine.Sophie Park/Getty Image.

It will be a very big deal if Mamdani wins the general election for mayor on Tuesday. New York will be led by a 34-year-old Muslim American democratic socialist, a drastic ideological and generational change from the incumbent, Eric Adams, a Black 65-year-old centrist ex-cop—and from the city’s entire mayoral history, really.

But Katz is aiming to do far more than win individual races. “I don’t want to just defeat Andrew Cuomo,” Katz tells me. “I want, in every race I do, anywhere, to defeat the politics of Andrew Cuomo. He embodies the smallness and the pettiness and this desperation for power that is willing to sell anyone out, to fuck anyone over, to get it. He’s a warped example, but it’s a rot that’s at the core of everything that’s wrong with our politics and the party.”

Katz and his candidates are at the epicenter of the debate roiling the Democrats about how to rebuild and how to respond to the second term of President Donald Trump. It’s a war between younger operatives and politicians, who are generally but not always to the left, and the more cautious moderate establishment Democrats, headed by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. Those two also happen to be from New York—but they grew up in a different city from the one that raised Morris Katz.

He thought he wanted to grow up to be a screenwriter. This made sense because his mother, Julie Merberg, is a children’s book author and publisher, and his father, David Bar Katz, was a writer on the 2022 TV series American Gigolo, a writer and producer on Ray Donovan, and a film and theater collaborator with John Leguizamo. One morning, when Morris Katz was 14, he alerted his father to a National Enquirer story claiming that David Bar Katz had been romantically involved with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had died days earlier from a drug overdose. The two men had been close friends, but the rest of the story was bogus; David Bar Katz sued, the Enquirer quickly settled, and the senior Katz used the money to fund an annual playwriting award.

Morris Katz grew up in Tribeca. When he was in middle school, his father introduced him to a friend who worked for then governor Cuomo and told her that young Morris was interested in politics. She graciously told Morris to let her know if there was anything she could do to help him. “You can help me,” Morris says he replied, “by having the governor stop blocking the mayor’s attempt to raise the minimum wage and pass universal pre-K.” That friend, Melissa DeRosa, is today one of candidate Cuomo’s senior advisers. “There’s absolutely no way it’s true he said that. I would remember,” DeRosa says. “And you should keep in mind this is someone who has lied about his age.” Katz, until this summer, had represented himself as two years older than his actual age, a legacy, he says, of an early political client who thought it would look bad to have someone so young in charge of the campaign.

Katz attended Beacon High School, one of the city’s elite public schools. A teacher there remembers him as a smart kid, though “he did not give off political genius vibes at 17.” Perhaps because Katz was busy writing six screenplays before graduating. For college, Katz attended Skidmore, where he volunteered for the 2018 campaign of Democrat Tedra Cobb, who took on incumbent Republican New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Cobb lost, but Katz became increasingly hooked on politics. A far more formative experience came in 2022, when Katz worked as a deputy media consultant for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. He watched hundreds of hours of footage from Dr. Oz’s show and even bought the supplements Oz was promoting, all in search of material to use in Fetterman’s ads. “Morris is a true believer in his candidates and spends a lot of time trying to get in their heads,” says Tommy McDonald, who was Katz’s boss on the Fetterman campaign and went on to co-found the Fight Agency, where Katz is now a partner. “The work he did around the softer side of John and the economic side of John, writing those plainspoken populist appeals, Morris was excellent at that.” (What does Katz think of Fetterman’s record as a senator? “I’m proud of the campaign that we ran,” he says.)

The Fetterman campaign provided what would become a sort of template for Katz’s clients: outsiders who were good at social media taking on the entrenched, big-money political class. His next major project was Dan Osborn, a US Navy veteran and industrial mechanic, making his first run for office as an independent in Nebraska’s 2024 US Senate race. “Morris created the Osborn brand,” a colleague from that campaign says. In order to learn how Osborn thought and spoke, Katz moved to Omaha and immersed himself in Nebraska’s issues and culture.

In the campaign Katz oversaw, Osborn railed at the system for shafting the regular guy and took a blowtorch to a TV to illustrate why the public was disgusted with conventional politicians. Osborn put a serious scare into Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, even outraising and outspending her by $6 million, and ultimately lost by just over six points. “When you have candidates that you need to look and sound and feel different, being younger is a huge asset,” says McDonald, who also worked on the Osborn campaign. “If it’s the same person that’s been writing ads for 30 years, it doesn’t feel as fresh.”

New York Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during an election rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) at Forest Hills Stadium on October 26, 2025 in the Queens borough of New York City.Andres Kudacki/Getty Images.

During a visit back to the city that summer, Katz sat down at a Queens coffee shop with a state assemblyman who was considering a long-shot bid for mayor. He was not inclined to get on board. “But it was love at first sight,” Katz says with a laugh. He and Mamdani bonded over the common threads in their upbringings—both have parents who are writers and directors, both attended elite city public schools, both live and die with the Knicks. But it was Mamdani’s take on New York’s economic inequality, and how it was grinding down younger residents in particular, that sold Katz. “Together they are like each other’s muses,” says Rebecca Katz (no relation), a Fight Agency co-founder and also a Fetterman campaign alumnus.

“From a creative standpoint, Zohran and I kind of spoke the same language, and we have an understanding of the importance of emotion. His entire campaign has made people feel good inside,” Katz says. “People running fucking 10,000 points of ads about how Joe Biden capped the cost of insulin—great. That is not resonating with people who are feeling despair. With Zohran, there’s just a narrative understanding that’s rooted in actually giving a shit about people.”

Katz’s responsibilities expanded far beyond making ads. “Morris has the pulse on a lot of leaders, people who’ve been in this game for a long time, and how to communicate with them—he knows exactly how to broker conversations with folks and get the right folks on the phone for Zohran,” says Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to Mamdani. Katz proved especially valuable in talking with Jewish leaders who were skeptical of Mamdani. There’s been backlash, with people criticizing him for being a self-hating Jew. “I have family members who’ve said vile things to me,” he says. “Certain people tell on themselves.”

Patrick Gaspard, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and president Barack Obama’s ambassador to South Africa, has helped connect Mamdani with New York and Democratic power players since the primary. “Morris is a phenomenal writer. He’s a sharp strategist. And he’s radically honest,” Gaspard says. “There’s just a calmness, a clarity about him. And I’ve seen him responding in real time, whether it was to the horrific shooting in midtown Manhattan this summer or to the moment when ‘globalize the intifada’ became an issue.”

Helping engineer Mamdani’s rise from polling in the single digits to a 13-point primary upset win over Cuomo has made Katz a hot property. Not long after that victory in New York, a group of Maine Democrats and labor leaders reached out to Katz. They had been searching the state for a candidate who they thought could knock off Susan Collins, the five-term Republican Senator who is up for reelection in 2026, and they had zeroed in on a 41-year-old native Mainer and Marine Corps veteran of three combat tours in Iraq turned oysterman named Graham Platner. The group enlisted Katz and another former Fetterman campaign operative, Joe Calvello, to persuade Platner. When he said yes, Katz shot a launch video depicting the bearded, bare-chested Platner as rugged and relatable. Volunteers and campaign cash were soon rolling in; a wave of adulatory media profiles followed. A poll showed Platner leading Collins by 14 points.

Then, Schumer recruited 77-year-old Maine governor Janet Mills to join the Democratic primary field, and an avalanche of opposition research began dropping on Platner’s head. Political director Genevieve McDonald quit after they became public, telling Politico that Platner’s explanations—that the posts were a product of a dark time in his life, when he was grappling with PTSD from his military service—weren’t good enough. A week later, her replacement quit, saying his wife was newly pregnant.

Katz, who had seen Platner with his shirt off while shooting the campaign launch ad, says he thought the tattoo was military-related, but that he was unaware the image could have Nazi connotations. “That’s not who he is. And he regrets saying those things, and he wanted to apologize for those things,” Katz says. Should Katz and other advisers have weighed Platner’s online history differently before launching the candidacy? He dodges, vehemently. “I think these decisions should be made by voters and not what do five assholes in DC think is disqualifying and not,” Katz says. “Because I think if we’ve learned anything from having lost the White House, lost the Senate, and lost the House, it’s that maybe the people who’ve been in these positions of power don’t have the greatest read in the world on what voters care about.”

Gaspard, the former Obama insider, says that Katz is deeply invested in Platner’s role in the bigger project. “Morris believes very, very strongly that there’s a common tongue of economic inclusion, economic populism, that we’ve got to tie ourselves to in the way that we used to as Democrats,” Gaspard says. “He sees Graham as someone who is the ideal standard-bearer for those values, for that story.”

Maybe Trump has lowered the bar for personal behavior so far that Platner’s shitposting won’t matter. Maybe the attention economy rewards Platner’s increased visibility regardless of the content of his old rantings. “I don’t know if anyone is spinning you that it’s a positive. It’s clearly not,” one Katz ally says. “They took a calculated risk on a uniquely talented person. It was like a bubble that popped.”

Platner continues to draw big, enthusiastic crowds, though, including a standing-room-only town hall this week in Damariscotta. The primary is still a long way off, in June. Katz needs to take care of business for another week with Mamdani in New York, but he sounds eager to head north, eat some oysters, and find out just how much Mainers are willing to forgive. “I think we have an important decision to make as a party, as more and more people who came of age in the internet era run for office: Are we going to exclude everyone who had not been plotting every move from the time they were a child?” Katz says. “If we’re not talking about affordability, if we are not talking about the villains who have rigged this economy, and the corrupt politicians, then what are we doing here? We should all go home.” As for Katz, he’s expecting to go to a Mamdani victory party and then back to the fight in Bangor and Lewiston and Ogunquit.

Chris Smith is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the best-selling author of The Daily Show (the Book) and Till the End (with CC Sabathia). Smith joined VF after covering politics, entertainment, sports, and crime for New York magazine. Follow him on Twitter. … Read More

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