New York Magazine's Intelligencer, June 4:
Over the weekend, Democrats around the country were in a panic. Graham Platner, their presumptive nominee for a Maine Senate seat that is the linchpin of the party’s fragile hopes for taking the majority, was revealed to have sexted with multiple women after he married his wife, Amy Gertner. (This was prior to latest round of anxiety around Platner’s candidacy, induced by a Thursday New York Times story reporting on his “unsettling” behavior with several women he dated.) In addition, the Bangor Daily News reported that Morris Katz, a top campaign adviser, was said to have “threatened” the former Platner staffer who revealed the existence of the incriminating sexts, injecting the appearance of campaign bullying into a metastasizing scandal.
In the hothouse world of New York City Democratic political consultants, which Katz came out of, the reaction was mixed: There was fear, of course, about dreams of a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate slipping away but also something that, if not quite glee, has a suitable German equivalent. “Schadenfreude,” said one local operative describing the mood in her group chats. “Everyone is delighting in this and is guns blazing for Morris Katz.”
Katz is a 27-year-old wunderkind of Democratic politics, a college dropout who did the scut work of campaigns before finding fame as one of the strategists behind Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected rise to the top of the 2025 New York City mayoral field. Profiles in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and this magazine followed, and Katz became a regular on the liberal-chat circuit: Pod Save America, Hacks on Tap, “The Political Scene” by The New Yorker, and David Axelrod’s speaker series at the University of Chicago.
He’s approaching the rarefied world of political consultants who become nearly as well known in their field as the politicians they help elect. Think Axelrod, for one, but also Karl Rove or James Carville. In the world of operatives, it’s a perilous place to be, and those who achieve such recognition tend to move away from politics and into punditry (as Axelrod, Rove, and Carville all did).
“Once you become famous in America, the only way you can earn a living is by being famous,” said Carville, who after helping elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and starring in a documentary about that campaign spent the rest of his career on paid speeches and working overseas. “You can’t work races. You become so much the story that wherever you go people follow you as much as the candidate.”
“I am sure all of the other Democratic campaign consultants in New York are absolutely salivating at this,” said Mike Murphy, a top aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney and a regular on the Sunday talk-show circuit. “You do a campaign in New York, which is the absolute nerve center of Democratic politics, and it works out, anything you do after is going to get a ton of attention and you get too much credit for what you do right and too much blame for what goes wrong.”
Had some other Platner aide reached out to Genevieve McDonald, the former Platner staffer, and demanded she retract the leaked texts to journalists at The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it would not have been as big a story. But because it was Katz, the story was picked up by the New York Post and other conservative outlets looking for ways to dent Mamdani and the socialist-aligned political movement that is behind him.
“The knives are out for him,” said another Democratic strategist, who, like many in New York politics, considers Katz a friend. “He went from being a nobody to being a rock star in a couple of months, and he’s 27 years old. There are going to be mistakes, and this is a big one. It’s a dumpster fire.”....
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