The lead media strategist behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run is a 26-year-old Tribeca native who now lives in Williamsburg, got into politics by accident, and co-founded a consulting firm on the premise that most political ads are bad. His name is Morris Katz, and he told his story to Tribeca Citizen in an interview published October 30, 2025, days before the election Mamdani would win to become the youngest New York City mayor in a century.
Katz did not set out to do this. He grew up wanting into the entertainment business, wrote screenplays and plays, and worked as a production assistant. His father is the writer David Bar Katz. The turn came when he wrote a profile of Erica Smith, a 2021 U.S. Senate candidate in North Carolina. “The candidate reached out to me and said you really captured my voice far better than I have seen it done before,” Katz told Tribeca Citizen. He went to North Carolina to help run her campaign, started making videos and ads, then moved to Pennsylvania to work on Senator John Fetterman’s campaign before coming back to New York.
Back home, he co-founded Fight Agency in 2024 with three partners. The pitch was a shot at the industry that trained him. “We felt the political consulting firms out there were fundamentally broken and responsible for so much of what was going wrong in the country,” Katz said. “They raise as much money as possible and buy a bunch of TV ads and say the same thing everywhere.” His fix, in his own words: lean into transparency, put “real people” on the ballot, and “make ads that don’t suck.” One of his partners is Julian Mulvey, who, according to Fight’s team page, helped produce the ads for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, including the Simon and Garfunkel spot “America.”
Katz says he met Mamdani about a year and a half before the interview, after hearing the assemblyman was planning a run for mayor. “He reached out to me to get coffee and in two minutes I thought, this guy can be the next mayor of New York,” Katz said. “I was totally taken with his energy and his authenticity.” Mamdani opened with the city, not his path to victory. “He was so laser-focused on a city that not only everyone could afford but everyone could afford to enjoy.”
Katz grew up in Tribeca under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he frames the cobblestone streets and the stretch of Hudson River Park he grew up on as examples of what government can pull off. “Every single neighborhood should be like ours, and every neighborhood can look like ours,” he said, casting Mamdani’s affordability message as extending that same quality of life citywide. “This is the root of what Zohran believes in, that government can make your life better.”
Katz went to PS 234, the Salk School of Science, Beacon High School and Skidmore College. He now lives in Williamsburg, though he told Tribeca Citizen he is back in Tribeca several times a week. “Tribeca will always be my forever home but I love Williamsburg too,” he said.
He was blunt about Mamdani’s general-election opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Katz called the Democratic primary “a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party,” said “there was no room in our party for a corrupt leader,” and described the campaign rhetoric as having “gotten really ugly and blatantly racist.” Asked what he wished he had been asked, Katz pointed to “the 13 credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Andrew Cuomo.” Those are Katz’s characterizations, made as Mamdani’s strategist during the race.
Asked what came after Election Day, Katz kept it short. “Post November 4th doesn’t exist,” he said.
