Morris Katz helped orchestrate New York’s big political upset. Now he’s shaping Democratic Midterm races
Morris Katz is a confident young man, but he did doubt himself in November, for a moment.
The 26-year-old media strategist, who helped orchestrate the greatest political upset of the decade, was sitting behind Zohran Mamdani, the then mayor-elect of New York City, on a flight to a much-anticipated meeting with United States President Donald Trump.
Scrolling the social platform X, he came across a post by a New York Post journalist that cited an anonymous Democratic operative who chided Mamdani for bringing along Katz and Elle Bisgaard-Church, his 34-year-old campaign manager, rather than more seasoned aides.
“Susie Wiles and that gang of vipers are going to tear them to shreds,” the post read, referring to Trump’s formidable 68-year-old chief of staff.
“Most of this stuff bounces off of me,” Katz recalled in an interview. “But I thought, ‘Oh God, maybe we are going to get eaten alive.’”
Instead, a US audience watched, stunned, as Mamdani and Trump hosted a news conference whose headline was its sheer affability. It went better than Katz could have possibly imagined.
Then again, so have most things in Katz’s short, charmed career.
Like Mamdani, Katz is a child of the New York cultural elite but is fluent in the anti-elite language of progressive populism.
In addition to his role as one of Mamdani’s closest advisers, Katz has helped to select, mould and make ads for a crop of rough-hewed, gruff-voiced Democratic candidates throughout the country, including Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner.
This makes Katz a kind of casting director for a future Democratic Party whose members wear Carhartt heavy duty workwear and aren’t afraid to say “hell” and “damn”.
“He has a vision in his head,” said David Axelrod, the media strategist who masterminded Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns and has shared notes with Katz.
Not everyone in the party shares that vision, particularly those Democratic insiders who believe the regular cycles of American political opinion will soon restore them to power.
But Katz’s proximity to the splashiest story in American politics has made him an in-demand image-maker. At a time when politics is pop culture, this gives Katz privileged access to the biggest show around.
In a statement, Mamdani called Katz a “a close friend, and a fellow New Yorker who wasn’t smart enough to get into Stuyvesant” — a joking reference to the ultracompetitive Manhattan public high school with a microscopic acceptance rate, which neither man attended — adding that his adviser “possesses the combination of ruthlessness and principle that’s all too rare” in politics.
Katz’s success, along with his age and sharply worded ideas about what is wrong with Democrats and the people who try to elect them, has helped thrust him into a broader conversation about how Democrats can win back voters they lost in 2024.
In seeking to rebrand the party, he professes an aversion to phonies so strong it would make Holden Caulfield blush.
“If you’ve wanted to be president since you were 5 years old, a large percentage of the electorate thinks you’re a loser,” Katz said.
“There’s a ‘no more losers’ thing. It’s harsh, but it’s true.”
He also strives to meet younger voters where they are. Katz’s 24/7 shaping of Mamdani’s message across a daunting array of media — from cable news to TikTok — suggests a thoroughly modern strategist, equally at home making a 30-second ad as he is brainstorming social media stunts.
On set
On a frigid Saturday in December, Katz sat in the living room of a well-appointed home on the west side of Des Moines, Iowa.
He was there to direct an ad for Nathan Sage, who is competing against several other Democrats in the primary for the Senate seat held by Joni Ernst, (Republican-Iowa), who is retiring.
Sage, a stocky, earnest former mechanic in the Marines, had no political background, and Katz was straining to make him act naturally in front of lights and a camera.
Katz and his colleagues wanted to air the ad on Fox News to gin up excitement about their candidate among Republicans and independents. But first, they needed to get Sage to give viewers something to be excited about.
Katz encouraged Sage to discuss the people he had met on a recent tour of the state. Now Sage began to loosen up, relating the financial struggles of Iowans back to his own childhood. He started to cry.
“I grew up in a trailer park in Mason City,” he said. As Katz fed him lines, Sage’s sadness welled into anger.
“We have some of the highest cancer rates in the country,” Sage said as he talked about a state bill that would protect pesticide companies from personal injury lawsuits.
“Say it as if it’s an accusation, not a fact,” Katz said.
During a coffee break, Katz conferred with Charlie Hills and Rebecca Katz, his colleagues at the Fight Agency, a strategy firm.
Rebecca Katz, a veteran political operative who was the lead strategist on the successful Senate campaigns of John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego — and who is not related to Katz — was worried that Sage seemed nervous. But there was good material, too.
“The moment where he’s getting choked up, we can do something with that,” Morris Katz said.
“That could go viral,” Hills added.
Getting into politics
Morris Katz attended the Beacon School, a prestigious public school in Hell’s Kitchen, where he was a Woody Allen-watching, Philip Roth-reading, Bob Dylan-listening occasional truant who dreamed of becoming a screenwriter. He wrote his first screenplay as a first-year student.
He also fantasised about politics, writing pretend stump speeches and spending hours reading about the progressive leaders of yesteryear.
As a student at Skidmore College, Katz started to take more seriously the idea of a political career, listening to Pod Save America and volunteering for the losing New York congressional campaign of Tedra Cobb.
Katz’s senior year of college was remote because of the pandemic, and he used much of his time to work for Erica Smith, a North Carolina state senator running for US Senate.
He made his first ads for her. On the trail, Katz said, a funder told him that 21 sounded too young to have a significant role on a political campaign, and that he should tell people he was 23 — a university graduate.
Katz’s work for Smith persuaded strategist Tommy McDonald to hire him as deputy media director on John Fetterman’s successful 2022 Senate campaign against Dr Mehmet Oz.
In October of that year, as Fetterman battled questions about his fitness for office after having a stroke, Katz wrote an ad, “Family Matters”.
In it, Fetterman used his near-death experience to pivot to a message about the way government should help families spend more time together.
It was a heartstring-puller shaped by Katz’s fine antenna for pathos, honed since his childhood around the theatre.
Fetterman set the aesthetic template for many of Katz’s candidates: a gruff white guy who looked as if he had just walked off a job site.
From him springs Platner, introduced to the American public in a Katz-penned and directed ad wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, pulling oyster traps as a guitar solo blares.
Sage’s whose campaign announcement featured a tool cabinet and light profanity.
And Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent who came within six points of taking a safe Republican Senate seat in 2024, was helped by memorable ads like one that featured him wielding a blowtorch.
These candidates share a willingness to name a villain, something Katz values highly.
Think “the billionaire class”, “the Washington establishment” and multinational corporations — the stock targets of the wing of the progressive left that sees appeals to class, rather than to identity or abundance or resistance to Trump, as the path forward for Democratic politics.
Through these attacks, Katz is also trying to press a new picture of political masculinity, one that, he said, “isn’t about throwing trans kids under the bus”.
He added: “Being a man is saying ‘I’m not afraid to stand up to corporations and billionaires’.”
A new insider
He’s made the media rounds, raising eyebrows in some political group chats with his pronouncements about the state of the Democratic Party.
“No one has a worse read on what electable means and less of a pulse on voters than the Democratic establishment in DC,” he said in an interview just after Mamdani’s victory.
This attitude has led other Democratic insiders to wonder if Katz is leveraging his connection to Mamdani to push his own brand — and his own hot-blooded candidates — at the expense of more established figures who can help the party build a durable majority.
Katz remains undaunted by charges of callowness, arguing that transformative candidates like Mamdani can “restructure power” in a way that lets Democrats dream of national majorities so large that they can enact sweeping change.
Of course, when a young person excels in public life, it can never be a simple cause for celebration: The nature of precocious success must be contested.
Is it the product of authentic greatness, too intense to wait its turn? Or else a flimsy imitation, waiting to be exposed?
“There are days I have intense impostor syndrome,” Katz said.
“What will shake me out of it is, I’m on some call with other consultants, and I’m hearing what they’re saying, and it is so idiotic. At least I’m not a net negative on these campaigns.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Joseph Bernstein
Photographs by: Lanna Apisukh, Shuran Huang, Ruth Fremson, Michael Ciaglo
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