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\n Photo: Adam Gray\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s candidacy, induced by a Thursday New York Times story reporting<\/a> on his \u201cunsettling\u201d behavior with several women he dated.) In addition, the Bangor Daily News reported that Morris Katz, a top campaign adviser, was said to have \u201cthreatened\u201d the former Platner staffer who revealed the existence of the incriminating sexts, injecting the appearance of campaign bullying into a metastasizing scandal.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cSchadenfreude,\u201d said one local operative describing the mood in her group chats. \u201cEveryone is delighting in this and is guns blazing for Morris Katz.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s unexpected rise to the top of the 2025 New York City mayoral field. Profiles in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and this magazine<\/a> followed, and Katz became a regular on the liberal-chat circuit: Pod Save America, Hacks on Tap, \u201cThe Political Scene\u201d by The New Yorker, and David Axelrod\u2019s speaker series at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n He\u2019s approaching the\u00a0rarefied 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you become famous in America, the only way you can earn a living is by being famous,\u201d 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. \u201cYou can\u2019t work races. You become so much the story that wherever you go people follow you as much as the candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am sure all of the other Democratic campaign consultants in New York are absolutely salivating at this,\u201d said Mike Murphy, a top aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney and\u00a0a regular on the Sunday talk-show circuit. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe knives are out for him,\u201d said another Democratic strategist, who, like many in New York politics, considers Katz a friend. \u201cHe went from being a nobody to being a rock star in a couple of months, and he\u2019s 27 years old. There are going to be mistakes, and this is a big one. It\u2019s a dumpster fire.\u201d<\/p>\n McDonald was brought on to the Platner campaign just as it was launching, according to multiple sources in Maine.\u00a0A 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\u2019s political director. She introduced him at rallies and to her network but left the campaign after old Reddit posts of Platner\u2019s were unearthed in which he made racist and misogynistic remarks; the candidate apologized<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s claim she didn\u2019t know\u00a0about 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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. \u201cAfter 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,\u201d McDonald wrote on Facebook.<\/p>\n
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