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. Worse still, according to a report in the Bangor Daily News, Morris Katz, a top Platner 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.
