Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an Ask Me Anything episode quite soon. So if you have any questions, email us at EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com with the headline AMA.
The Democratic Party's in a tense moment right now. And the implosion of Grant Plattner's Senate campaign in Maine has become a focal point for those tensions.
Democrat Grant Plattner said he is dropping out of his state Senate race. It follows allegations of rape and physical abuse, which he denies.
I just want to make it clear. This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen.
After months of debating what the lessons of Plattner's sudden rise were, now it's all about the lessons of his even more sudden fall. And every faction has a lesson and wants the other faction to learn. To the Democratic establishment, it shows the failures of the populace to vet their candidates. You can't trust them. Look at how Plattner fell apart under scrutiny. What if that had happened after the date when Maine's Democratic Party could still choose a new candidate? The populists want to protect what Plattner seemed to be proving before his implosion, that the Democratic establishment is intensely vulnerable, that it's out of touch with the electorate. Plattner did, after all, beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate, before his campaign collapsed.
And a lot of the anger has focused on Morris Katz, a strategist at the political consulting firm Fight Agency. You may not have heard of Morris Katz, but he is a consultant in his late 20s, so he's young, and he sort of burst onto the scene as Zoran Mamdani's key political advisor, and then as Plattner's strategist. But before that, Katz was the ad maker for John Fetterman's 2022 campaign. He was one of the key strategists on Dan Osborne's independent run for Senate in Nebraska in 2024. So there's been a certain kind of working class coded populist campaign that Katz has really become central in defining. So here was this guy who people really hadn't heard of before. And it was the right hand man of the two Democratic politicians probably getting the most press this year.
And 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. He had a DSA letter being circulated trying to argue that the DSA shouldn't work with him any longer. And 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 Plattner could have cost Democrats the Senate this year. Katz has also clearly figured something out about this political moment that strategists many years his senior have not. So I want to have him on the show, ask him both about what he clearly has gotten right and what he just as clearly got wrong. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Morris Katz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Ezra. It's good to be here.
What happened in Graham Platner’s campaign implosion and why does it matter for the Democratic majority?
So we're talking in the aftermath of Graham Plattner's campaign imploding after a credible accusation of rape. There's a lot of people angry at you, some of the people you worked with for poorly vetting Plattner, but also I think for attacking people who are trying to raise the alarm on him. So now that you've had some time to digest what's happened, what do you think went wrong?
I think a lot of the critiques and anger are fully valid. I've been very critical of the democratic establishment frequently. And where those critiques come from is not that they make mistakes. It's that they make the same mistakes over and over again, because learning from those lessons would pose a threat to their kind of power. And I don't want to do that. And I think they're like things here. Many of the critiques that have been 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. Eric Swalwell served on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade and then saw similar allegations end his campaign.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:29
2
What happened in Graham Platner’s campaign implosion and why does it matter for the Democratic majority?
3:29–9:19
3
Who is Morris Katz and what is his track record recruiting outsider candidates?
9:19–35:49
4
How did the Platner recruitment and vetting process unfold and what red flags emerged?
35:49–1:18:19
5
Why did campaign staff resign and what internal conflicts over disclosure arose?
1:18:19–1:20:08