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Morris Katz said he was wrong to not only excuse, but venerate, the Reddit posts and Nazi-affiliated tattoo of Graham Platner, who recently withdrew from the Senate race in Maine.
“In hindsight, knowing what we know now,” Katz, 27, told The New York Times in an interview published Friday, “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.”
The admission comes after some Democrats and key Platner supporters like the Democratic Socialists of America have publicly urged candidates not to work with Katz, though NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and House Democratic nominee Micah Lasher stand by him.
Katz previously defended controversial posts
By now Platner’s controversies are well known. He jumped into the Senate race after an expedited vetting process turned up some red flags, while others were revealed through a drumbeat of investigative stories. He once described himself on Reddit as “a communist,” and told victims of rape and sexual assault to “take some responsibility for themselves.” He disavowed the Nazi-affiliated tattoo on his chest. And his wife told the campaign she found evidence on his phone that he had sexted multiple women shortly after they got married, complicating the timeline of when Platner said he turned his life around.
Still, he easily won the Democratic Senate primary, having already muscled the state’s Democratic governor out of the race. But before Platner formally accepted the nomination, The New York Times, Politico and CNN reported that at least two women accused Platner of sexually assaulting them years earlier while they dated, which the candidate denied.
While Republicans and conservative news outlets seized on Platner’s early controversies, supporters of the first-time populist candidate largely dismissed them.
Unconventional, yet authentic candidates, “will have said things that they will have regretted,” Katz told The Wall Street Journal shortly before the primary, when asked about Platner’s Reddit posts. Disqualifying candidates over posts like that is “incoherent,” he said. “How many think pieces have been written about ‘how do we win back angry young men and we have someone who was one of them and who made it out the other side, who is uniquely equipped to bring them back into our fold?” he told the outlet.
Katz also said it “doesn’t quite make sense” for Democrats to talk about expanding their coalition while disqualifying people over past behavior they apologized for.
Katz now has a different take.
When asked by The Times to reflect on Platner’s Reddit telling sexual assault victims to “take responsibility,” he told the outlet, “I think it should have been a red line.” He went on to say that people should be given a chance to show they have learned from past mistakes, “But also, that doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to a role in elected office.”
Katz flips on vetting process
“Fight is not a vetting agency,” Katz told The Times, referring to the political consulting firm where he works. “That’s not a service we offer. We work with campaigns, and campaigns work with vetting professionals.” Katz also told the outlet that “there is no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign,” referring to the assault allegations which had not previously been made public.
Before the primary, Katz told the Journal, “we have a formal vetting process” and “we take the vet seriously.” In a video accompanying that story, the Journal noted that Katz worked with two other consultants who initially found Platner and “worked with the pair through the vetting process.”
Straight Arrow previously reported that one of the consultants, Dan Moraff, was asked three times to do more vetting, but failed to do so, citing sources with knowledge of the situation. Politico later echoed that reporting, citing a source as well as “correspondence” reviewed by the outlet.
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