Who are they fighting for?
The Platner disaster and the perils of for-profit politics.
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The Graham Platner debacle in Maine was a terrible way to begin an electoral season that will culminate in November’s crucial midterm elections.
For months, Platner had seemed to personify a new archetype of Democratic politics — the fighter. A tattooed veteran and rural oyster farmer who was (or claimed to be) working class, as well as an articulate advocate for progressive policies like Medicare for All, Platner briefly seemed to be a one-man antidote to political ennui.
But well before the beginning of July — when Platner faced rape allegations on top of a series of other revelations of personal and sexual misconduct — it had become clear that his image was indeed too good to be true.
That shouldn’t have been surprising, because it had been constructed by a team of political consultants and operatives who spent recent years recruiting and promoting similarly typecast “working class” candidates.
Consultant with a cause
In 2024, some of the most successful members of a new political consultant class started a business, naming it the Fight Agency. One of them was now 27-year-old wunderkind, Morris Katz, who was instrumental in recruiting Platner and in shaping his public image — just as he had done for two other “unconventional” candidates, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Zohran Mamdani in Katz’s native New York City.
Katz is the Tribeca-raised son of a Hollywood screenwriter and wrote several screenplays himself while he was attending an elite NYC public high school. He dropped out of college in hopes of pursuing a career in Hollywood, but found his true calling in creating the media images of political candidates, starting with Fetterman’s 2022 campaign, in which he partnered with several veterans of Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs.
In what was soon to become a pattern, Fetterman’s campaign was marked by a sardonic, video-clip driven publicity campaign masterminded by Katz, who made brilliant use of the candidate’s “unconventional” tattooed and goateed appearance to drive him to victory despite a mid-campaign stroke.
Katz later racked up yet another high-profile victory when another brilliantly executed video campaign provided the lynchpin for the rise and victory of Mamdani, New York City’s second democratic socialist mayor.
In the wake of Mamdani’s triumph and the sudden national ascendance of the DSA, Katz became a political celebrity who appeared in magazine spreads.
But he claimed to be more than the latest brilliant political marketer. Hearing Katz discuss his work, one can easily forget that he is in the for-profit media consulting business, because he presents himself as a man on a mission to tear down what he describes as the “Democratic establishment” on behalf of “working class outsider[s].” The Fight Agency website says the enterprise is not simply seeking to win elections for its clients, but also to “fight the toughest battles in politics” on behalf of working Americans whose way of life has been declining for the “last forty years.”
There is, however, a tension between being a political marketer and staking out the role of an insurgent activist by taking on the leadership of the Democratic Party, putatively on behalf of a large swath of downtrodden American voters.
A few obvious questions are presented: How do Katz and his colleagues choose the candidates they promote? And are those candidates actually prepared both to win general election campaigns and carry out the epochal, transformative political project Katz envisions?
Recent events offer indications that the answers to those questions may be unsatisfying.
Scouting for American originals
The Fight Agency website declares that Katz and company seek out “American originals.” But their record indicates that they sometimes create candidates that fit within their stereotypical definition of “working-class outsiders,” most of whom are — or at least appear to be — roughhewn types who can convincingly present themselves as dedicated opponents of the “establishment.”
The first hint that the political judgment of Katz and his colleagues may lag far behind their media acumen came in the wake of Fetterman’s unlikely victory when the senator — who the Katz circle sold as a progressive, pointing to his prior support of Bernie Sanders — turned out to be a mercurial member of the Senate who spends ungodly amounts of time on Fox News and sometimes threatens to leave the Democratic Party.
But while Fetterman’s quirks could, rightly or wrongly, be attributed to cognitive deficits arising from his stroke, the same cannot be said about Platner, who — as revelation after revelation demonstrated — was a man who had long wrestled with many inner demons, and who was utterly unprepared and unsuited to be a candidate for high office.
The obvious question was, how did Katz and his associates choose this deeply flawed candidate to be their “fighter” in perhaps the most single most important race in the 2026 midterms?
Just weeks ago — when Platner’s campaign was at its brief apex — Katz and members of his circle recounted the story of their creation of his candidacy to the Wall Street Journal. The story, which has since been filled out by additional reporting, rapidly became a cautionary tale.
Then Yale law student Daniel Moraff and his partner, graduate student Leanne Fan, took on on the role of informal candidate headhunters for Katz. Moraff — once a college organizer for Jill Stein, the perennial left-wing presidential candidate and stooge for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — had a checkered past as a campaign operative, having been fired from one progressive campaign over allegations of sexual misconduct. But he and Fan had apparently nonetheless garnered Katz’s trust as reliable spotters of potential “American originals.”
The couple traveled to Maine during the spring of 2025, intent on identifying a progressive candidate to promote in the primary race to select the opponent for vulnerable Senate incumbent Susan Collins. Fan apparently started the project by scouring the internet, where she found an enticing video produced by the Maine Agricultural Association in which Platner narrated his soon to be familiar life story of leaving behind years in combat by “Coming Home to Farm Oysters.”
According to Moraff and Fan, the next thing they did was locate the records of Platner’s political contributions, and they were delighted to find that he was a supporter of Bernie Sanders and other progressives. That fact, as well as learning that Platner had previously been talked about as a potential local candidate, apparently sealed the deal.
Soon thereafter, Katz, Moraff, and Fan set out to convince Platner to run, including by promising to raise the first million dollars for his campaign.
In the WSJ video, which was shot after some (but not all) of the skeletons in Platner’s tightly packed closet had become public, Katz claimed his team took “the vet very seriously.” It has since been reported, however, that after an initial review raised red flags, a research firm “recommend[ed] the campaign pay for ‘on-the-ground research’ and a deeper dive into Platner’s digital footprint, warning that his ‘rising profile’ made the discoveries a growing risk to his candidacy.” Katz and the campaign apparently ignored the warning.
Furthermore, Katz reportedly later deployed threats and intimidation to attempt to keep a former Platner staffer from disclosing that Platner was well aware his death’s head tattoo was associated with the Nazi SS, as well as his recent history of extramarital sexting.
Now is the time to learn lessons
No new product, or outsider political candidate, can succeed without a strong marketing effort. That is an area where the Katz circle has shined, as exemplified by the meteoric rise of Platner.
Several of the founders of the Fight Agency are, like Moraff and Fan, veterans of one or more of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, which apparently affords them the ability to get the ear of the patriarch of the growing progressive movement. The fact that their American originals, including Fetterman and Platner, also tend to have a history of supporting Sanders does not hurt.
It is therefore unsurprising that Sanders agreed to jump start the Platner campaign by introducing the then brand-new candidate at a September 2025 “fighting oligarchy” rally in Maine. Sanders apparently put his stamp of approval on Platner, like Katz, without asking many questions.
And as Platner’s campaign rapidly took off, an impressive array of other national Democrats endorsed him as well, with some of them joining the bandwagon even after facts like Platner’s Nazi-inspired tattoo came to light.
Some of Platner’s most prominent leftist supporters, including Sanders and champion of the cause of Epstein victims Ro Khanna, tenaciously clung to their support of Platner until the very end, when he was credibly accused of rape.
When asked whether he regrets endorsing Platner, Sanders repeatedly refused to answer, suggesting that admitting error would discredit the other left-wing candidates he has been promoting.
Some progressives have been asking questions, including about the wisdom of tying their movement — let alone the Democratic Party — to the project of the Katz circle. But Mayor Mamdani appears not to be among them. In the wake of a call by some in the DSA to break ties with Katz, Mamdani said at a press conference last month that “I will continue to work with Morris Katz. He remains a top adviser of mine.”
In the wake of the Platner debacle, it’s important to remember that Katz and his associates, like all political consultants, are businesspeople, not activists — they make money whether their candidates win or lose. But it is not just the candidates who have a lot on the line. Especially at linchpin moments like this, voters have a lot at stake too.
Just weeks ago, Katz — even as he was deploying threats to keep some of Platner’s skeletons in the closet — was seeking to position Platner as a presidential candidate, apparently hoping to forestall Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is not among his clients) from seizing the progressive lane in the soon-to-form primary race. One can’t deny his audacity. One can, however, reasonably question whether this young, modestly experienced, operative is fully prepared to replace the Democratic Party “establishment,” despite all of its flaws.
By a financial measure, Fight Agency will likely come out ahead from the Platner debacle. Platner spent nearly $20 million in his primary campaign through June, millions of it on media related services. (Because the funds flowed through several generically titled LLCs, it is impossible to determine how much went to Katz and his firm.) Furthermore, Fight Agency likely reaped a quick windfall by working for billionaire Tom Steyer, who fell short in his self-funded vanity campaign for California governor. (Katz said he was comfortable working for Steyer because he is a traitor to his billionaire class.)
One thing is clear, however: Many voters contributed their hard-earned money to a campaign that enriched Katz, and left Maine Democrats in a huge — and entirely avoidable — pickle.
Katz will move on to the next race. But the damage he and his associates left in their wake may well be long-lasting, and extend far beyond the borders of Maine, if Troy Jackson, the hastily chosen Platner replacement, is unable to rapidly raise the money and build the political infrastructure required to beat a formidable candidate like Susan Collins.
Bernie Sanders says now is not the time to ask questions about the mistakes he, and by implication, his associates have made. He could not be more wrong. The cost of failing to ask questions, and learn from mistakes, could be astronomical.
That’s it for now
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I think the only people allowed to run for Congress, are those who actually went to a grocery store in the last year. (For president, only those who know how to open doors themselves.)
“To summarize: It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.” — Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, part two of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.