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.
