Morris Katz grew up walking his younger brothers to PS 234 down Greenwich Street. That Tribeca childhood, he says, shaped his conviction about what government can do for a neighborhood. At 26, the born-and-raised Tribecan (now living in Williamsburg) served as lead media strategist for Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign and co-founded Fight Agency, a progressive political consulting firm that works for candidates across the country.
Getting into politics happened, Katz said, “kind of by accident.” He had been working as a production assistant in the entertainment industry, following the path of his father, writer David Bar Katz, when he wrote a profile of Erica Smith, who was running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. Smith reached out after reading it, telling him he had captured her voice better than she had seen it done before, and asked him to come to North Carolina and help run her campaign. He went. From there, Katz moved to Pennsylvania to work on Senator John Fetterman’s Senate campaign before returning to New York, where in 2024 he co-founded Fight Agency with three other partners.
The firm was built around a pointed critique of how political campaigns have long operated. “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. “It was an outdated model. They raise as much money as possible and buy a bunch of TV ads and say the same thing everywhere.” Fight Agency would do it differently, Katz said: be transparent, back candidates with authentic stories, and make “ads that don’t suck.”
Mamdani reached out for coffee roughly a year and a half before Katz gave the interview. As Katz told the Tribeca Citizen in an October 2025 Q&A, he was won over immediately: “in two minutes I thought, this guy can be the next mayor of New York.” What struck him, he said, was Mamdani’s focus on constituents over ambition. “Often when you meet candidates, the first thing they talk about is their path to victory or themselves. He was so laser-focused on a city that not only everyone could afford but everyone could afford to enjoy.” A shared public-school background reinforced the connection, which Katz called “a cultural New York fluency,” noting they both attended New York City public high schools.
Katz described the Democratic primary as “a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party,” framing the choice as a referendum on whether to back Mamdani or former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opponent. “We believed that there was no room in our party for a corrupt leader,” he said, adding that rhetoric he observed from the Cuomo side had become “really ugly and blatantly racist. Frankly that is not New York.” At the Q&A’s close, Katz volunteered, unprompted, that he wished he had been asked about “the 13 credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Andrew Cuomo.”
The campaign’s broader pitch drew directly from Katz’s Tribeca upbringing. He pointed to the neighborhood’s cobblestone streets and its stretch of Hudson River Park as “examples of government excellence” that most New Yorkers take for granted. “Every single neighborhood should be like ours, and every neighborhood can look like ours,” he said, holding up Mayor Bloomberg’s investment in public open space as a model of what Mamdani’s platform was built to replicate. “This is the root of what Zohran believes in: that government can make your life better.”
Featured image: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
