Embattled Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s campaign team includes an interesting cast of characters.
From the Democratic Socialists of America couple who knocked on his door and recruited him to run to a pivotal adviser who helped elect New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year, here are some members of the crew responsible for Platner’s rise from obscurity to his now-uncertain future as the apparent nominee.
Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan.
Platner recounted his first meeting with Moraff and Fan during a recent appearance on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.
“Last summer, end of July, some people came to my house,” Platner told Stewart. “They had been in Maine for a few months … looking for someone to run for U.S. Senate against Susan Collins.”
Platner, who last week denied allegations of sexual misconduct on top of mounting controversies uncovered from his Reddit account and other past public comments, said Moraff and Fan were “looking specifically for a kind of working-class person on working-class economic policies.”
“They had found me because I did a video a few years ago fighting against a Norwegian salmon farm that was trying to come into our bay,” the Marine veteran and oyster farmer said. “They looked me up, and they saw that I donated to Bernie Sanders, and they were like, ‘Oh!’”
He added: “My wife and I, quite honestly, told them to f*** off because that was the weirdest, most random thing.”
Though Moraff and Fan remain adamant that they called first after discovering Platner through Maine’s union network and a New York Times travelogue about oysters, the pair persevered and Platner, who in April pushed popular Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) out of the primary, relented.
Moraff, a political consultant at Dark Forest and a Yale Law School graduate, and his fiancee, Fan, a City University of New York Ph.D sociology student, met on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign. They previously recruited Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and mechanic, and Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Nathan Sage, also a Marine veteran and mechanic, according to Politico. Both Osborn and Sage bear striking resemblances to Platner’s background.
The New York Post reported the couple also recruited Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) for the Pennsylvania State House, with Moraff, Lee’s first campaign manager in 2018, getting his political start in Pittsburgh as a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party,” he wrote in 2017 in In These Times of his strategy. “Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists.”
For the Maine race, Moraff and Fan thought they had originally found a winner in former union president Chris Williams before they found “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” Williams told Politico.
“It was a go,” he told the outlet. “They decided to go in a different direction — some two and a half hours northeast.”
Morris Katz
After meeting Platner, Moraff called Morris Katz, 27, a Democratic strategist with Fight Agency who also worked on Osborn’s campaign, in addition to that of Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA), though his claim to fame is his high-profile role on Mamdani’s counterpart.
“Within, like, five minutes,” Katz told Politico of Platner, “I was thinking, ‘Holy s***, this guy can help save the Democratic Party.’”
Katz is a media and ad expert who has been credited, along with campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church, for drafting the three-part plan that got Mamdani elected in November.
“There is a broader lesson for the party in that one,” Katz told New York Magazine. “A lot of times, the consultant approach is you have your playbook and you’re jamming these candidates into your playbook. 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.’”
But that strategy has not appeared to have paid off with Platner, whose words and actions seem to be catching up with him.
Katz has been criticized during the Platner campaign for threatening former staffer Genevieve McDonald last week through a third party if she were to cooperate with outlets reporting on the candidate’s explicit text messages to women who are not his wife.
“Just want to be clear on where we are right now,” Katz wrote in the message, according to the Bangor Daily News. “If the story goes in its current iteration we’ll communicate directly on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Publicly, Katz, who once hoped to include his penis in his 2020 book for boys about puberty, excoriated the reporting on the sexting drama, posting on social media that, “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.
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“There should be no place in our politics for incompetent, opportunistic operatives who violate privacy, betray trust, and prioritize vengeance over decency,” he wrote.
Amid last-minute attempts to replace him as the presumptive nominee, Plater has a 7 percentage point advantage over incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), according to an average of polls from March to late May compiled by RealClearPolitics.
