Last summer, a loose network of the city’s political operatives who consider themselves members of what they call “the competent left” — progressive but also determined to actually win elections — were in despair. Lefty incumbents and challengers were losing to moderates in primaries, Donald Trump looked set to win back the White House, and the Democratic Party was rapidly distancing itself from its liberal base as if its taint could affect the whole party. That’s when a few members of this cohort started reaching out to Morris Katz, a 28-year-old fellow operative who was commuting back and forth to Nebraska where he was working to elect Dan Osborn, a union steamfitter running a strong independent campaign against a Republican senator. They wanted to know if Katz would meet with a 32-year-old Queens assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani, who was thinking of running for mayor.

He demurred. The left was reeling, so why get involved with a democratic socialist who had almost no shot of winning? “I was thinking, ‘How are we ever going to win again?” Katz tells me. “We were just constantly getting tripped up by these self-inflicted wounds and these candidates who let themselves become caricatures of themselves. We had no message discipline, we’re getting fucking outspent everywhere and we’re not focused, and we say we are this grassroots movement but we are not actually that inspiring.”

Then Mamdani himself reached out and Katz felt he could demur no more. The two met at Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffeeshop in Astoria where Mamdani asked, “Am I crazy for thinking about this?”

Katz told Mamdani that he thought he might be, but to give him his pitch anyway.

“His pitch was that the left is really struggling, and that this campaign can be a model for what  strong campaigns should look like,” Katz says. “He said that people agree with us on economics, and at a moment when income inequality is rising, we actually have the ideas that can address it, but the problem is we just run these undisciplined campaigns that aren’t able to execute on it, that get distracted by a million other things, and we don’t try anything creative and aren’t able to run professional campaigns.”

Political operatives are supposed to keep a kind of professional distance from their clients, but after 45 minutes of Mamdani describing what kind of mayor he hoped to be, Katz was enamored. “I left thinking, ‘I love this man. And I am supposed to be skeptical. What is going to happen when the rest of New York gets to know him?” he says.

At the time, the prospect of his candidacy seemed ludicrous. Here was a two-term member of the state assembly with a scant legislative record, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America at a time when even its putative fellow travelers in office were pivoting away from the party. But over last summer and fall, Mamdani, his senior advisor Katz, and campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church sketched out a three-part plan to get the attention of voters and then to get them to take the young upstart as a serious contender for City Hall. Now, with just days to go until the primary ends, Zohran Mamdani has become the unmistakable story of this election, someone who even his rivals — even advisors to Andrew Cuomo — acknowledge has run the best campaign of this cycle, one that has gone remarkably according to plan.

Katz has the manic energy of a sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated twenty-something New Yorker caught up in a cause. When we met for lunch outdoors in the Flatiron District, he had just come from the campaign office and headed back when we were finished. Colleagues say they will call late at night and he will still be in between meetings.

Politics was not in his blood. His grandfather, Harry Jay Katz, was a nightclub owner, newspaper publisher, and restaurateur known as “The Philadelphia Playboy” in part for his efforts to open a Playboy Club in that city. His mother, Julie Merberg, is a children’s book author and publisher and his father, David Bar Katz, is a screenwriter and producer who was behind Ray Donovan. (David discovered the body of Philip Seymour Hoffman, his close friend, in Hoffman’s apartment after he died of a heroin overdose in 2014. When The National Enquirer reported they were lovers, David sued and used the settlement money to give an annual prize to young playwrights.) Morris was raised in Tribeca and went to Beacon High School, an elite public school on the west side, thinking he would also be a screenwriter, having written a half-dozen screenplays by the time he graduated.

When Trump first won in 2016, Katz was a student at Skidmore College and got caught up in the liberal fervor of the moment. He volunteered for a Democrat running against Rep. Elise Stefanik upstate near where he went to school. Though his candidate lost, Katz caught the politics bug, using his screenwriting chops to write ads and give messaging advice to Democratic candidates.

Earlier this year he joined Fight Agency, a Democratic media firm whose mission is to find candidates for high office who aren’t the typical lawyers or legislators, but are embedded in their communities and help them craft the kind of messages that can win over voters that Democratic campaigns tend to ignore. Their candidates are usually on the left side of the economic spectrum, but exude a kind of working-class authenticity combined with a populist economic message that cuts across the usual red-blue geographic divides. Take, for instance, Ruben Gallego, a Medicare-for-All supporter who has pushed Democrats to appeal to Latino men who want to drive around in a “big ass truck” and John Fetterman, who before his sharp turn to the right was best known as pro-trans rights, pro-legal weed Bernie Sanders supporter from the Pennsylvania rust belt.

“If you just look at the polling and do what it says you are going to keep getting the same result,” says Tommy McDonald, a mentor to Katz and founder of Fight Agency. “The question is can you make your campaign about larger things in order to cut through a crowded race. It’s about finding candidates that don’t fit the mold, find out what makes them tick, and what is authentic to them and to the people of your community, and if you do that you can make the campaign about something larger.”

A large part of the surprising strength of the Mamdani campaign has of course been the candidate, who is a natural in front of the camera and staked out the far-left lane of the mayoral race at a time when the rest of the field was running to the center. His team made a decision early on that unlike DSA campaigns of the past, they wouldn’t focus on firing up their base, figuring that the base would fire up itself. Instead, they would try to talk to New Yorkers who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to an Astoria socialist by using an economic message. While the rest of the Democratic field was talking about crime and disorder, Mamdani made “affordability” the buzzword of the campaign by promising free buses, free childcare, and a freeze on rent-stabilized apartments. It’s a familiar technique of Rebecca Katz (no relation), another co-founder of Fight Agency who pushes candidates to articulate simple, digestible policy ideas that align with their overall message and narrative. Mamdani has been so successful at it that polls show that voters now rank the affordability issue as higher in importance than crime.

“It’s about ensuring that New Yorkers were seeing themselves in the policies we were putting forward and in the kind of politics we were espousing,” Mamdani tells me. “There has been a willingness in this campaign to look beyond the way mayoral campaigns have been run in the past. So often these campaigns are contested on network TV or through mailers or radio and we are a campaign that has looked to engage with New Yorkers as they engage with the world around them and speak directly to their concerns.”

That meant social media. Mamdani’s launch video, in which he walked around the streets of Astoria over a hip-hop inflected backbeat and talked up affordability, got over a million views in the first 48 hours. His campaign then broke the 24-hour record for mayoral campaign fundraising. Each of next videos became viral sensations, including one where he took the “polar plunge” into the frigid waters off of Coney Island in a suit in order to call attention to his plan to “freeze the rent.” In another, he talked up rising Halal cart prices to highlight affordability — never mind that the traditional Democratic strategy guide would suggest that a Muslim candidate avoid anything associated with Halal. The video was picked up by Eater and other food media. Another simply showed Mamdani arriving unannounced at the homes of donors in order to thank them, showing the sort of ease with people that became his strength as a candidate.

“There is a broader lesson for the party in that one,” says Katz. “A lot of time the consultant approach is you have your playbook and you’re jamming these candidates into your playbook. And with Zohran it’s the other way around. If you believe your candidate can pull something like that off, you just have to let him cook. That’s our campaign motto: ‘Let Zohran cook.’”

There is a risk to this however, and to any campaign that puts authenticity as the highest value. Compared to his rivals, Mamdani has scarcely backed away from his earlier calls to defund the police, and the campaign didn’t scrub his social media feeds of tweets in which he criticized capitalism or proclaimed that “defunding the police is a feminist issue.” Just this week Mamdani set off a torrent of criticism when he refused to reject the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call for violence.

The campaign didn’t hire a digital fundraising firm, an almost unheard of practice in a  mayoral race, figuring that their fundraising would have to happen organically and that it would be a waste of money. And while the typical mayoral playbook calls for hoarding money  until the end of the race, the Mamdani campaign went on the air earlier than their rivals, pushing ads during Knicks playoff broadcasts. Instead of doing 30-second spots during local newscasts, they ran two-15-second spots that bookended the ad breaks.

Still, much of Mamdani-mentum has been organic. That’s how you get “Hot Girls for Zohran” — an outfit that is unaffiliated with the campaign, to say the least — making goofy viral car wash videos, and knockoff Mamdani merchandize worn in the city’s chic precincts, and how you get “Mamdani for Mayor” becoming a status symbol on Hinge.

A Marist poll this week showed Mamdani down 11 points, a big gap but a significant improvement over Cuomo’s previous 22-point lead. The Mamdani’s campaign’s hope is that their field operation, which consists of a staggering 46,000 volunteers and has already knocked on over 1 million doors, will bring out the kind of irregular voters that public polls aren’t catching. The Cuomo campaign has privately delighted in the fact that their closest competitor is a 33-year-old socialist, a Muslim dogged by accusations of antisemitism. As the race has gotten closer a super PAC associated with Cuomo has been blitzing the airwaves with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of attack ads every single day, calling Mamdani inexperienced and radical.

But if the Cuomo campaign thinks they have the opponent they wanted, Katz says that the Mamdani campaign does too, and that the waning days of the race will turn into a referendum not just on the future of New York, but on the future of the Democratic Party as well.

“Democrats lose because they refuse to take strong positions to fight for working people and refuse to take on corporate power,” Katz says. “That was our analysis of the 2024 election, and that’s our analysis of this race. It’s the politics of Andrew Cuomo that gave us Donald Trump. And so we have to ask voters what they prefer: big money and small ideas or a new generation not beholden to billionaires?”

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