Ezra Klein always has an angle and today it seems to be an attempt to rescue and rehabilitate Morris Katz. Katz is the guy who helped convince Graham Platner to run for the Senate and who made ads for his campaign. But as Klein admits, since Platner’s campaign imploded a lot of people are mad at Morris Katz.
…now, among both the left and the center, the knives are out for him.
You have all these stories about the slipshod way he was running the campaign. You had a Democratic Socialists of America letter being circulated trying to argue that the D.S.A. shouldn’t work with him any longer.
I think you can really see this one both ways. Katz made genuinely huge mistakes. It is very possible that the failure to effectively vet Platner could have cost Democrats the Senate this year. Katz has also clearly figured out something about this political moment that strategists many years his senior have not.
That last sentence is, I think, why Klein is doing this. He likes what Katz is doing and he’s giving him a huge platform to reset the narrative and humanize himself. And so, the first part of this interview is basically Morris Katz admitting that, yeah, he probably screwed up by not noticing what a creep Platner was sooner.
I think there are things here, many of the critiques that have been made, that are incredibly valid and things to learn from.
The conversation around the vetting — there is no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign…
That being said, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone probably should have been enough — or should have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough.
It takes a while but Klein eventually comes back to some of the specifics and Katz again agrees that he missed some obvious red lines.
One of Platner’s old Reddit posts regarding victims of sexual assault stated:
Holy [expletive], how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so [expletive] up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?
That’s from 2013. What do you think when you hear it now?
I think it should have been a red line.
He talked about it being one of the things he regretted saying the most, that it was indicative of a time of his life when he was lost and angry, and that it was in no way reflective of who he was.
He missed that one, he now says. What about the story about him sexting several other women? Katz didn’t miss that one, he hid it.
One of the things that really shifted my thinking on Platner, though, was something that you did know early on, which is about his sexting as many as a dozen women in the early days of his marriage…
So when that came out, it made me wonder about his present, and, particularly, what it made me wonder about, fundamentally, was his honesty.
We publicly didn’t know that for quite some time. It was brought to the campaign early on through his wife, Amy Gertner.
What did you think when you learned about that? Combined with some of these other things — the Totenkopf tattoo, the Reddit posts — why did that not begin to worry you more about whether or not he could actually be trusted in what he was saying?
I think it both did worry me more, and some of those concerns at the time were eased by the communication from Amy herself and from Graham that this was something that they worked through extensively in their marriage…
The challenge of all of this was — as someone who does deeply believe in grace and nuance and the fact that people are complicated and life is complicated and maybe politics should reflect a little bit more of that — there was a constant weighing of: How much is too much? What is the red line? And I think, obviously, I did not see it soon enough.
I’ll give Klein some credit for not letting Katz completely weasel out of this.
Other people who were involved did see a red line sooner. Genevieve McDonald was the campaign’s political director. She resigned back in October 2025, around a lot of this. She knew about the sexting, she knew about the Reddit posts, the Totenkopf tattoo.
It has been reported that when you heard she was speaking to The Wall Street Journal about Platner’s cheating, you demanded she retract her comments, send you a recording of her talking to the reporters retracting her comments, and if not, that you would attack her for sabotaging the campaign.
Do you owe her an apology? Have you apologized to her?
So there are parts of that description that I would take some issue with. The thing on that specific issue that I was articulating was that it was a violation of Amy’s privacy.
For all the conversation about vetting, part of what the vetting process requires is a lot of honesty and transparency from candidates. When, as a team, you go to them and say: Hey, we need you to tell us everything — part of what didn’t work in this instance is when there was not full transparency.
In that specific instance, Amy came to her and was fully honest. To see Amy’s trust violated like that, and to see that practice that allows campaigns to operate and us to get to a place of honesty violated like that, was frustrating.
Katz knew it was true and did everything he could to keep it hidden in hopes his candidate could squeak through and he’d be hailed a hero again. But since it all imploded, now he wants to say it was a close call and he just missed a few red lines. That’s true but he missed them intentionally. He was happy to push Platner across the finish line despite all the red lines. And that’s why, even as he’s saying the other issues should have been enough, he’s still defending those same issues as not significant enough to sink Platner.
Just to be clear on one of the points: We did not know — there has been speculation of what we knew around some of the more serious later allegations and when, and we did not know until the day or two prior to that story coming out that there was a credible and serious allegation of rape.
The area we were in, in terms of the things we knew, were sexting, Reddit and tattoo land. To your point, none of those things alone in a vacuum was necessarily disqualifying.
So which is it? Should those things have been red lines and enough to end Platner’s run or were they not enough to be disqualifying. Katz’s answer in this interview is both. He’s really sorry he missed the red lines but also none of them mattered.
By about halfway through this, Klein is complimenting Katz.
The people who rise to the highest ranks of political power in this country do have an X factor, and we can’t ignore that. You uniquely can’t ignore that in the modern media environment where you can’t just run a campaign on 30-second television ads.
This is what I want to zone in on, because I think Fight, as a consultancy, and you, as a consultant, are good at finding people with the X factor.
The rest of the interview is focused on Mamdani and other candidates and Katz’s view of populism. There are no more tough questions. Like I said, this was a rehabilitation exercise of someone Klein clearly likes.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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