Photo: Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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. (This was prior to latest round of anxiety around Platner’s candidacy, induced by a Thursday New York Times story reporting on his “unsettling” behavior with several women he dated.) In addition, the Bangor Daily News reported that Morris Katz, a top campaign 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.
He’s approaching the rarefied world of political consultants who become nearly as well known in their field as the politicians they help elect. Think Axelrod, for one, but also Karl Rove or James Carville. In the world of operatives, it’s a perilous place to be, and those who achieve such recognition tend to move away from politics and into punditry (as Axelrod, Rove, and Carville all did).
“Once you become famous in America, the only way you can earn a living is by being famous,” said Carville, who after helping elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and starring in a documentary about that campaign spent the rest of his career on paid speeches and working overseas. “You can’t work races. You become so much the story that wherever you go people follow you as much as the candidate.”
“I am sure all of the other Democratic campaign consultants in New York are absolutely salivating at this,” said Mike Murphy, a top aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney and a regular on the Sunday talk-show circuit. “You do a campaign in New York, which is the absolute nerve center of Democratic politics, and it works out, anything you do after is going to get a ton of attention and you get too much credit for what you do right and too much blame for what goes wrong.”
Had some other Platner aide reached out to Genevieve McDonald, the former Platner staffer, and demanded she retract the leaked texts to journalists at The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it would not have been as big a story. But because it was Katz, the story was picked up by the New York Post and other conservative outlets looking for ways to dent Mamdani and the socialist-aligned political movement that is behind him.
“The knives are out for him,” said another Democratic strategist, who, like many in New York politics, considers Katz a friend. “He went from being a nobody to being a rock star in a couple of months, and he’s 27 years old. There are going to be mistakes, and this is a big one. It’s a dumpster fire.”
McDonald was brought on to the Platner campaign just as it was launching, according to multiple sources in Maine. A former state lawmaker and lobster-boat captain, she was working as a renewable-energy consultant when Platner, whom she had only a glancing acquaintance with, called to offer her a job as the campaign’s political director. She introduced him at rallies and to her network but left the campaign after old Reddit posts of Platner’s were unearthed in which he made racist and misogynistic remarks; the candidate apologized.
The Platner campaign has dismissed McDonald as nothing more than a disgruntled employee, and McDonald has admitted almost as much. She asked for severance and was denied it, but what really set her off was when Platner, appearing on The Briefing With Jen Psaki on MSNBC disputed McDonald’s claim she didn’t know about the Reddit posts. McDonald went to work for Jordan Wood, a good-government advocate mounting a long-shot congressional bid. She began telling people in Maine politics about Platner’s sexts in the hopes that Democrats would recognize that he would be a flawed general-election candidate against Republican incumbent Susan Collins and would nominate Governor Janet Mills instead.
But Mills failed to get any traction and suspended her campaign in April. Only afterward did the press pick up on the story, first The Wall Street Journal, which didn’t name McDonald, and then the Times, which did. As the stories were coming together, Katz reached out to McDonald through an official with the Woods campaign. “After WSJ reached out to the Platner campaign for comment, Morris Katz demanded that I call the WSJ, retract my comments, tell them their reporting was inaccurate and send him a recording of the call,” McDonald wrote on Facebook.
The Bangor Daily News didn’t repeat McDonald’s Facebook allegations but reported that Katz wrote in the message, “If the story goes in its current iteration we’ll communicate directly on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
The network of New York political operatives cringed when they saw Katz’s efforts to get ahead of the story. “First of all, you never put that kind of thing in a text message,” said one New York strategist. “And second of all, you never have a man do it.” Added another, “I think at some point you just have to realize that the person you are dealing with on the other side is not listening to reason and you have to cut bait and figure out how to respond.”
Few considered Katz’s message to be much of a threat but a direct way to respond when a former staffer is leaking confidential information to the press: Ask them to stop and say you will name them as the offending party if they do not. McDonald was, in fact, inflating the number of women that Platner had been in touch with (she said it was 12; the actual number is half that), and the Platner campaign did want her to correct the record and verify that she had done so.
Members of the Platner brain trust have been under a bit of a siege mentality ever since the stories of his offensive Reddit posts first surfaced in the fall. They genuinely believe that Platner is a generational political talent. By pointing out to the press that McDonald was a former and disgruntled employee who was betraying the confidence of the candidate’s wife, officials thought the story could be neutralized. The Platner campaign still believes that no one in Maine really cares much about his personal life and that this is all chum for the NYC-D.C. twitter crowd. But the betting markets, which were likely overstating Platner’s chances against a formidable Collins, have tumbled, and an internal poll released this week by the Platner campaign showed him up only by four points.
Platner has already withstood the kinds of negative stories that would likely sink any other candidate: a Nazi tattoo, toxic posts, questions about whether or not he is the working-class oyster farmer he claims to be. He defeated the popular Mills and has led in the polls against Collins throughout the race. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s approval rating is an abysmal 23 points underwater in Maine, a number that should be enough to sink any Republican on the ballot. The economy continues to face headwinds while war rages in Iran, and Democrats believe that Maine, with its flinty practicality and mostly secular electorate, is willing to look past Platner’s indiscretions.
But that assumes that this current scandal is contained and as operatives speculate about what else could be around the corner. “Are we going to see pictures of Graham Platner’s penis before this is all over?” asked one strategist. “I think we almost certainly will.”
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