Does Morris Katz Know What Working-Class Voters Want?

One day over the summer, Morris Katz slouched into our booth at a diner in Brooklyn Heights, removed his backwards baseball cap, and stuffed a Zyn pouch into his mouth. He took out his iPhone (no case, gaping crack down the back) and put it face down on the table. Then, while claiming, “I never do this,” he plunked a Hershey’s kiss into his espresso. The 27-year-old political strategist and Zohran Mamdani confidant was ready to speak.

Katz believes that the Democratic Party is beholden to billionaire oligarchs and is out of touch with the economic issues that working people care about. The world has worsened for most Americans, and he thinks Democrats are afraid to name the culprits. “You can’t tell someone they’re getting fucked and not tell them who’s fucking them,” Katz said. He loathes politicians who seek incremental change. The party, he says, needs to run outsiders who promise to blow up a corrupt system.

Katz is articulate (profane, but articulate), confident, and podcast-ready. When it comes to his day job, making campaign ads, even Katz’s critics concede that he is a generational talent. He made his name on Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. David Axelrod became a mentor. Other campaigns across the country couldn’t wait to hire him.

He was on a vertical trajectory through much of 2026. One of his biggest victories came in June, when his client Graham Platner defeated Maine Governor Janet Mills in the state’s Senate primary. Then everything imploded. Platner dropped out of the race following a cornucopia of scandals, involving everything from Nazi tattoos to rape allegations. Katz was ridiculed, and Democrats seemed to recognize the risk they’d taken in entrusting a crucial Senate race to someone too young to remember September 11.

But Katz remains a force in Democratic politics heading into the midterms. Fight Agency, the firm where Katz is a partner, was set up to support progressive outsiders running for office. Katz seeks out candidates who can be credible populist messengers. Whether they are in fact members of the working class—Platner relied on money from his wealthy parents well into adulthood—matters less to him than whether they come across that way. They need to look the part: beards, Carhartt, and tattoos (except Nazi ones) are a plus. And they must be charismatic public speakers, both in front of a crowd and mediated through an iPhone. The ads that Katz makes aren’t subtle. Recent spots for Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running for Congress in Ohio, feature the candidate playing football, driving a forklift, and promising that he wants to “go build stuff,” not think about politics. Other Katz clients weld, farm, and fix heavy machinery on-screen.

Katz, it should be said, does not weld, farm, or fix heavy machinery. He is a child of urban privilege. More on that in a minute.

Pointedly missing from Katz’s vision is the idea that Democrats need to move to the center on social issues. Katz believes that if Democrats fully embrace confrontational economic populism, they will make cultural moderation unnecessary, because voters care more about material concerns. A class war, in other words, will trump the culture war. In one recent Katz-produced ad, Gina Hinojosa, running to unseat Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, tells the camera, “They want to run an entire campaign saying that I’m too woke. Let’s roll. I plan to spend an entire campaign focused on the fact that working people are too broke.”  

Katz’s clients have been successful in intra-party contests in some deep-blue areas, including New York City. One Katz candidate and Mamdani ally, Claire Valdez, is a former Columbia University union worker who supports abolishing ICE and promises to invest in “queer and trans liberation.” She defeated the handpicked successor of the retiring incumbent in her primary this summer, and is the overwhelming favorite to win the general election. She’ll be representing parts of northern Brooklyn and western Queens in Congress come January.

Winning over voters outside Brooklyn and Brooklyn-like regions is another story. Fight Agency’s candidates have so far struggled in purple states.They perform best with a growing cohort of young, highly educated, downwardly mobile voters—not coincidentally, the kind of voters most likely to hold progressive views on both economic and cultural issues. Katz’s candidates correctly sense that people want representatives who will fight against the establishment, Axelrod told me. “But progressive politicians and their supporters, consultants, and strategists have to recognize that it’s hard to lead a working-class movement if the working class isn’t following,” he said.

Katz believes that he will be vindicated. And he has held on to a surprising amount of power following the Platner fiasco. He is working for something like 12 candidates and two super PACs (he told me he’d have his assistant follow up with the exact numbers because he couldn’t remember them; she said it changes so often that she can’t provide a full list), while informally helping Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. Katz, or at least Katzism, could determine whether Democrats win or lose in the midterms. The question of whether Katz has unlocked a formula for winning back working-class voters, or is instead speaking to the disenchanted sons and daughters of the upper-middle class—people like him—has therefore become a matter of national importance.

Like many professional economic populists, Katz comes from a privileged background. His grandfather Harry Jay Katz was heir to a hosiery fortune and an infamous Philadelphia playboy. His mother is a successful children’s-book author; his father is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include the John Leguizamo comedy The Pest. As a kid growing up in Tribeca—an actual working-class neighborhood, a very long time ago—Katz thought he would write plays or films himself one day.

Much of his political education seems to have come from movies. A favorite is Angels With Dirty Faces, about the divergent paths of two boys who attempt to rob a train car. One evades the police and later becomes a priest; the other is caught, embarks on a life of crime, and is executed by the state. Katz quoted the last line to me: “All right, fellas, let’s go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.” The moral of the film, he said, was that “there is a randomness to who gets to succeed and who doesn’t.”

Other political lessons came on the job. During the pandemic, he dropped out of Skidmore College to manage Erica Smith’s campaign for a North Carolina congressional seat. Katz, who was 21 at the time, cast himself in the role of experienced political operator, telling people he was 23 to seem more credible. He met Rebecca Katz (no relation), who would later hire him at Fight Agency. In hindsight, they laugh about how clueless he was. But to others, he appeared preternaturally self-assured. When the Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson called him to offer advice and assistance, Katz instead lectured him on how to court working-class voters. Jentleson was aghast. “There’s nothing in his background that struck me as offering him any additional insight into how to win working-class people,” Jentleson told me. “It was like, Why should I listen to this kid?” (The relationship between Katz and Jentleson, whose consulting firm caters to more moderate candidates, has only deteriorated since then. Katz said that the story was “fabricated,” and that he had asked Jentleson for advice and explained his campaign plan.)

[Jonathan Chait: The crisis for Democrats in Michigan]

Katz accompanied Smith on a tour of all 100 counties in North Carolina. People in the counties that went for Trump had the same problems as reliably blue voters, Katz realized. But they didn’t want to hear about the Green New Deal or any other progressive hobbyhorses. Over time, he revised Smith’s stump speech to focus on her personal story instead of her policies. As the primary neared, Katz felt confident in his candidate’s chances. Then AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, spent more than $2 million attacking Smith and boosting her primary-election opponent. Smith ended up losing. Katz insists that if AIPAC hadn’t gotten involved, she would have won.

He became convinced that elites were distorting democracy by thwarting the will of the people. He brought this belief to congressional campaigns for Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman (who won), New York’s Jamaal Bowman (who lost), and Nebraska’s Dan Osborn (who lost in 2024 and is running again). But he would probably still be merely another young ad maker if not for Zohran Mamdani.

In 2024, Mamdani—then a barely known state-assembly member—asked Katz to coffee. Within two minutes, Katz thought Mamdani could be the next mayor. He helped create Mamdani’s launch video, in which the young candidate dedicated his campaign to working-class New Yorkers and promised, “We can afford to dream.” From the start, Katz was unlike other members of the team. Staffers often rope family and friends into appearing as extras in campaign ads. For Mamdani’s first television commercial, when an extra dropped out at the last minute, Katz found a replacement in Mimi O’Donnell, the longtime girlfriend of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman—Katz’s godfather. Katz took colleagues out for steak dinners with seafood towers and martinis, sometimes expensing the bill and sometimes paying himself, one told me. The waiters always recognized him.

Mamdani’s campaign became famous for its use of direct-to-camera video to connect with voters. When the candidate entered the race, he was polling in the single digits. But he flooded social media with clips that appeared spontaneous and relatable, helping them go viral. In one, he talked about how inflation had increased the cost of street-cart chicken. In July 2025, he won the primary by 12 points. Katz got much of the credit. One profile of the strategist, published in Vanity Fair, praised him for “helping engineer Mamdani’s rise.” He’s been called a “wunderkind” more times than he can count.

In fact, Katz didn’t make any of the viral social-media videos. He advised on communication strategy, but stepped in to make Mamdani’s television ads only once the candidate had the funding and name recognition to pay for them. Fate had also helped Mamdani hugely by giving him a pathologically flawed opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The wunderkind narrative therefore rankles some of his former colleagues. I spoke with a number of Mamdani-campaign staffers—all of whom requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their career—who took issue with how much credit Katz got. “Enough with this guy,” one said.

The staffers seemed confused by how Katz had come to be seen as responsible for the mayor’s success. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising. Katz’s day job involves portraying privileged candidates as paragons of the working class. A similar logic might explain his own trajectory: The smooth-talking consultant who claims he knows how to win over skeptical voters gets credit for it—regardless of the underlying reality.

Katz thought he had his next coup with Graham Platner. Katz helped persuade him to run for Senate in Maine and helped make his launch video. The video is warm-hued, set against sun-dappled Maine-waterfront backdrops. In it, the candidate does kettlebell swings, farms oysters in a stained sweatshirt, chops wood, and declares that “the enemy is the oligarchy; it’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out.” The video received more than 2.5 million views within 24 hours.

But almost immediately, incriminating details emerged about Platner’s past. First came the discovery of offensive Reddit posts, then the revelation that he had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest. Katz was playing a leadership role but was unprepared for the responsibility, according to his former colleagues on the Platner campaign. “It felt like there were no adults in the room,” one of them told me. “He’s a decent person and quite smart, but taking on roles that he doesn’t have experience in doing.” Katz would be better off if he spent less time talking to reporters, the colleague said. (In our interviews, Katz insisted he doesn’t want media attention.)

Platner ran as an insurgent challenging Governor Mills, Chuck Schumer’s preferred choice. While Mills ran as a conventional Democrat, Platner supported Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel. Even with his vulnerabilities, he easily won the primary. Polling suggested that voters saw Platner—a tattooed, mustachioed guy with a deep voice—as relatively moderate, despite his policy positions.

To Katz, those polls vindicated his theory of politics: As long as a candidate runs on economic populism and can credibly play the role of the blue-collar outsider, voters will follow. But how Platner would have fared in the general election is unknowable; after the primary, he began sliding in the polls. In July, Politico published the account of a woman who accused Platner of raping her. Platner denied the allegation. Two days later, he dropped out of the race.

[Tyler Austin Harper: The contradictions of Troy Jackson]

Katz has been severely criticized for the Platner episode. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, one candidate has been attacked for working with Katz. Hundreds of members of the Democratic Socialists of America signed a letter accusing Katz of having “appropriated the American working class’s burgeoning desire for authentic champions.” They asked that DSA-aligned politicians disavow him. The media discourse frustrates him, he told me; he never asked to be cast in the role of the Democrats’ savior. “It’s like, This guy thinks he’s such a fucking genius, and look at him now. I never said that. Like, you guys said that!”

Mamdani has kept Katz on as one of his closest advisers. And Katz is already talking about how he’ll apply the lessons he learned in Maine. “Obviously I fucked up with Graham, and there are, like, a million things I would do differently now,” he said. In hindsight, he says the Reddit posts should have been the red line that forced Platner to drop out of the race. I asked Katz what that line should be in the future. “It’s a little bit like, you know it when you see it,” he said. (He had, of course, just missed a red line when he saw it.)

Katz still believes in his theory of politics. After all, he said, if establishment Democrats are so smart, why do Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress? And now he has plenty of chances to show that Katzism offers a viable alternative. Katz spends much of his time flying across the country to shoot ads for his midterm candidates. These include Randy Villegas (a Bernie Sanders–endorsed former teacher running to flip a congressional seat in California) and Donavan McKinney (a DSA member who ousted the incumbent Democrat in a safely blue Michigan congressional district). Some of the ads resemble short films more than campaign spots. A recent video for Gina Hinojosa features clips of the candidate talking about her choice to continue a pregnancy even after doctors told her the baby would not survive outside the womb—a subtle and somewhat un-Katzian gesture toward cultural moderation. (“There is room for cultural moderation in a district-specific, state-specific way,” Katz allowed when I mentioned the ad.) His influence is strongest in New York, where he works for three Mamdani-backed candidates who are all but certain to win congressional seats in November.

But his candidates still have yet to prove that they can attract the working-class voters Democrats need to win back. In his Senate race, Fetterman did best in traditionally Democratic areas—college towns, urban areas, and highly educated suburbs. In working-class areas, he performed significantly worse than the moderate, suit-wearing Josh Shapiro, who won the governor’s race in a landslide. (Since his election, Fetterman has become one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate.) Mamdani dominated in neighborhoods with a high proportion of young people, renters, and college graduates. In Bushwick and Prospect Heights, for example, he beat Cuomo by nearly 70 points, while Cuomo won in heavily working-class Staten Island. In Michigan’s primary, El-Sayed won in precincts where people had higher education levels but lower incomes. Katz seems to have an uncanny ability to speak to a population that grew up accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle and now doubt whether they’ll have what their parents did. But his efforts to reach the working class seem to instead reflect a Brooklyn Democrat’s idea of blue-collar voters.

I asked Katz about his outsider candidates appealing mostly to people inside the Democratic tent. First, he disputed the premise of the question. Then he suggested that his candidates’ struggles are the result of being outspent on TV. But he was confident that working-class voters will come around eventually. “There’s just a challenging reality that some of this takes work and time,” he said. “It takes a lot of months, a lot of years, to establish fundamental realignments. And what’s occurring is a fundamental realignment. And it might not happen in two months or six months or one cycle, but it’s happening.”

Katz’s views reflect a common theory among anti-establishment candidates and consultants on the left and the right. He believes that supermajorities of the population want the same things that he does. The problem, as he sees it, is that billionaires are distracting voters with culture-war issues and preventing working-class people from hearing the populists’ message.

Voters do not in fact agree with progressive Democrats on everything. In much of the country, the working class in particular believes that the Democratic Party is out of touch with their values on issues including immigration, DEI policies, and gender. The idea that Democrats can win back the ground they’ve lost to the GOP during the Trump era without addressing that weakness head-on is far-fetched. (It’s not for nothing that the strongest Trump-state electoral overperformers this cycle, based on polling, are moderates, such as Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Mary Peltola in Alaska. El-Sayed, by contrast, appears to be an underperformer. A recent poll gave Michigan’s establishment-Democratic candidate for governor a 12.4-point lead, compared with just a 2.5-point lead for El-Sayed.) And if they don’t become competitive in more places, then they won’t have the political power to pass the kinds of populist reforms that Katz so badly wants to see—a fact that Katz acknowledges. “What defines the vision is a desire for real power that can fundamentally change the trajectory we’re currently on,” he said. “What that requires is winning a lot of hard elections in a lot of places and making those in positions of power better.”

Recent polls suggest that Democrats have as much as a nine-point advantage on the generic ballot. In that environment, even weak candidates who lack broad appeal could win. The real way to evaluate Katz’s candidates will be to compare their margin of victory with the overall results.

[Marc Novicoff: How the polls could be wrong again]

I asked Katz if there was anything that could convince him that his approach is wrong—that progressive candidates really do need to moderate on certain social issues to win hard contests. He seemed confused by the question. “I don’t necessarily have an easy, like—that’s what we have elections for.”

I tried again. What if El-Sayed does not win in Michigan, and voters say that’s because he seems too close with Hasan Piker, the Communist-sympathizing Twitch streamer? Would that change your perspective?

“I think Abdul is going to win,” he said.

I waited, and Katz kept riffing. “I think about politics a lot like sports, in the sense that anyone who’s trying to be good at the job watches a lot of tape.” Just as coaches add new wrinkles to their offense during the offseason, he’ll review the midterm results and make changes for 2028.

It was a convenient way to avoid answering the question. So I asked what he’s learned from this midterm cycle, one in which a scandal-plagued populist candidate has already dropped out and others are polling worse than their moderate-Democrat peers.

“Well, I want to see what happens in November,” Katz replied.

As the election approached, Katz and I kept in touch, and he began to joke more frequently about leaving politics. He said it so often that I started to wonder if he was serious. Yes, he spends much of his time writing scripts and staging scenes—as he’d always intended—but he seems miserable. Katz assured me that he really was just kidding and has no plans to find a new line of work. Depending on how the midterms go, he might want to reconsider.

*Illustration Sources: Adam Gray / Bloomberg / Getty; Angelina Katsanis / AFP / Getty; Eleanor Dearman / Fort Worth Star-Telegram / Tribune News Service / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty.