Morris Katz Backed Cuomo, Criticized Sanders Before Political Career

NEW YORK — Morris Katz is celebrated as the 26-year-old savant and strategist behind Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to become New York City mayor.

But before he was a blip on anyone’s radar, Katz spent his time lauding Mamdani’s future arch-rival Andrew Cuomo and criticizing the pillars of leftist politics. In those days, he described the moderate Cuomo as “competent,” derided Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as a “socialist” and took potshots at then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gotham’s progressive standard bearer at the time.

“Not enough attention has been payed [sic] to his incompetence throughout all of this,” the then-20-year-old tweeted in 2020, referring to de Blasio. “Luckily Cuomo’s been competent enough to help mitigate the damage.”

Katz’s social media commentary came in response to a post from his uncle, the music producer Billy Mann, who was opining on de Blasio’s school closures during the Covid pandemic.

“Watching @BilldeBlasio press conference this morning was painful,” Mann had written. “Nothing personal, but he showed the executive skills of a Middle Schooler & message delivery acumen of an unknown cousin’s hug at a funeral, even w good intentions.”

Since-deleted tweets from the years before Katz catapulted into consulting stardom offer a previously obscured perspective into how “one of the masterminds” behind Mamdani’s campaign — as Katz was described by Vanity Fair — formed his political identity.

Some of the posts show how Katz’s politics from his early 20s were more aligned with the well-connected world he grew up in — and stand in stark contrast to his present salad days, with Katz now in high demand to lead outsider, populist campaigns that highlight the divide between the wealthy and everyone else.

In 2020, when Cuomo ordered the release of 1,100 prison inmates during the early months of the Covid pandemic, Tiffany Cabán, one of New York City’s most prominent democratic socialists at the time, took to social media to thank the “advocates & organizers” — but not Cuomo — who worked to release the incarcerated.

Katz defended Cuomo, who would later play the role as Mamdani’s top competitor in the 2025 mayoral election.

“Thank you @NYGovCuomo for actually being the person releasing the incarcerated people,” Katz replied to her post.

Katz offered that praise for the man reviled among the city’s left six years before he would go on to become the political whisperer to outsider-y candidates like Maine’s oyster farmer-turned-congressional-hopeful Graham Platner and democratic socialist New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who is vying to upset Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s handpicked successor. Katz produces videos and ads for the two candidates.

He told POLITICO in a statement that his old posts are not representative of his politics today.

“Before I was old enough to drink, I had not yet honed all of my political beliefs and occasionally tweeted things I obviously don’t agree with anymore,” he said. “I’m glad a few cherry picked posts of my 20 year old self are providing some entertainment, but I’m proud to have spent the last five years on the front lines of the fight for a Democratic Party that has the courage to stand up to the oligarchy, and against AIPAC.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become a boogeyman for many on the left, as well as some of President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Aside from advising Mamdani, Katz's work over the years includes campaigns and PACs aimed at electing progressive and democratic candidates around the country, including former democratic socialist members of the House, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, and progressive Texas Rep. Greg Casar.

Katz backed someone the Democratic Socialists of America has touted as the first democratic socialist elected in North Carolina, Carrboro Town Council member Danny Nowell, and he supported politicians aiming to attract voters from both parties, like Nebraska’s independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.

But during much of that time, Katz also skipped out on voting in presidential elections when Trump was on the ballot — including in 2024, according to public records. He didn’t vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris, President Donald Trump or anyone else that year.

Public records reviewed by POLITICO also show Katz didn’t register to vote until March 2021, when he was 21 years old — despite identifying himself as a “young voter” in a 2020 Twitter post.

That didn’t stop him from sharing his political opinions online. In 2019 and 2020, Katz wrote more than 57 Twitter posts either praising 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or criticizing Sanders, who was also seeking the Democratic nomination for the White House.

“Caught between a socialist and an oligarch, @PeteButtigieg looks better every day,” Katz wrote in a February 2020 post, referring to Sanders as the “socialist.”

Jon Paul Lupo, a Democratic strategist who works in New York politics, said consultants like Katz should be entitled to change their political beliefs over time — especially if their early beliefs were adopted at the start of their adult life — and that the role of a strategist is focused on what the candidate believes, not themselves.

“Political consultants, if they're doing their job properly, they should be giving advice to candidates who have values on how to best express their values and succeed,” Lupo said, adding that he thinks Katz’ values are clear today. “The consultant’s personal beliefs genuinely should not be a part of that.”

In a statement, Andrew Epstein, a political aide to Mamdani, defended Katz when asked about the posts.

"Our opponents spent millions last cycle trying to make the Mayor's old tweets the story. New Yorkers didn't bite,” Epstein said. “They want to know what you're going to do for them, and Morris is focused on advancing the affordability agenda and electing fighters for the working class."

Katz, a Skidmore College dropout, was born and raised in lower Manhattan to children’s book publisher Julie Merberg and playwright and television producer David Bar Katz, who recently produced Paramount Television’s “American Gigolo.”

Through his mother, Katz wrote a slate of children's books for her publishing house Downtown Bookworks and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, including titles like “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Puberty — and Shouldn’t Be Googling: For Curious Boys,” which was published in the months before he managed his first political campaign.

On page 17 of that book, next to a chart of fruit and animals symbolizing different stages of puberty, Katz wrote: “At first, we were going to use images of my penis to get this point across, but the publisher said it was inappropriate so here we are.”

Katz declined to comment on that passage as well as his voting record.

Through his father, Katz has links to key players inside Cuomo’s orbit, including the former governor's top aide Melissa DeRosa.

Bar Katz posed for photographs with DeRosa at the launch party for her tell-all 2023 memoir, “What’s Left Unsaid.” The book is a sympathetic account of her time in the Cuomo administration amid the scandals that brought the governor down. Katz’s father is also closely affiliated with Cuomo’s close confidante Dan Klores. Bar Katz and Klores produced a 2011 play that Cuomo attended, and Bar Katz is on the board of advisers for the charter school Klores founded. The two also serve on the board of the nonprofit Building for the Arts.

“My connections with Dan, Melissa were both outside of the context of politics,” Bar Katz told POLITICO.

He said he knows Klores through their work in theater and met DeRosa because she lived above a popular hangout for people in the theater community, the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill.

Many of Katz’s tweets from his college years backed up or amplified DeRosa’s talking points.

In 2019, he cheered her on as she slammed the Sanders’ campaign for writing a letter to the DNC asking the party to consider sanctions against Cuomo for not immediately signing into law a bill that would have given voters more time to change their party registration before primary elections.

“Elections are emotional but everyone needs to take a breath,” DeRosa tweeted in response to the Sanders campaign’s plea.

“Taking a breath doesn’t seem to be a specialty of the Sanders camp ...” Katz replied, piggybacking on her criticism.

Mamdani often cites Sanders as one of his political idols whose 2016 presidential run gave him “the language of democratic socialism” to describe his politics. The Vermont Senator used his influence throughout last year’s mayoral campaign to boost Mamdani, including during a Queens rally with him ahead of the general election.

In an October piece in Vanity Fair, Katz painted a different picture of his attitude toward DeRosa in the years before he stepped into the political spotlight. He recalled that his father once introduced him to DeRosa when he was in middle school, and that he confronted her, pressing her to make “the governor stop blocking the mayor’s attempt to raise the minimum wage and pass universal pre-K.”

“There’s absolutely no way it’s true he said that. I would remember,” DeRosa told Vanity Fair. “And you should keep in mind this is someone who has lied about his age.”

During Mamdani’s mayoral campaign last year, Katz told Vanity Fair and The New York Times he was 28. He now says he lied about being two years older because he was told it would serve him better in politics.

DeRosa confirmed to POLITICO she had met the younger Katz but denied the interaction ever occurred. She referred POLITICO back to her Vanity Fair comments. Another fact that may complicate Katz’s memory of confronting DeRosa is the timeline of Cuomo’s tenure. He did face calls to raise the minimum wage and enact universal pre-K — but the two policy fights occurred during different years of his term.

Bar Katz said the incident definitely happened — and he told POLITICO he remembers how Morris “immediately expressed his opinion very vociferously and eloquently.”

“Melissa was very gracious about it, because he was a kid,” Bar Katz said. “I understand why Melissa doesn't remember it, if that's the case, because for her it was like two minutes of some kid going off in a restaurant.”

In fact, Bar Katz says the incident was just one of a few of young Katz’s political confrontations that became “lore in the family.”

He recalled one instance where he and his son were at a 2013 Citi Field baseball game between the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies, where the two ended up sitting three rows behind Trump and then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Bar Katz recalled how his son, sporting a Phillies cap, approached O’Reilly and “just starts excoriating” him over his political statements. O’Reilly told POLITICO he has no recollection of the event.

“In politics, Morris was a self-starter,” Bar Katz said, recalling how his son would read “old political magazines” lying around the house, including Partisan Reviews from the ‘40s and ‘50s. “I thought for a long time he was going to go into screenwriting, and he was interested in that, in film and television. He, just through his own interest in writings, went in the direction of politics that was not through any connections whatsoever.”

Katz’s first political gig was as a canvasser and volunteer for Democratic congressional candidate Tedra Cobb during both of her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2020.

Between those races, Katz wrote a glowing, lengthy blog post about former North Carolina Senate candidate Erica Smith that has since been deleted. In Katz’s telling, Smith loved how he captured her voice so much that she asked him to join her second campaign for Congress in 2022, and he soon became her campaign manager.

In a statement, Smith told POLITICO that Katz “honed his political tactics and belief in populism” during her campaign, where he waged “a battle against AIPAC and special interests.”

Katz also wrote blog posts about Democrats like Texas Senate candidates Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez and Beto O’Rourke, urging the latter to run for president in an “open letter” in 2019. More recently, he’s shifted to criticizing Buttigieg, the Democratic idol he boosted most online before turning his political interests into a career.

During a November interview with NPR after Mamdani’s win, Katz was asked what he thought about Buttigieg not congratulating Mamdani after the victory. The young political operative hesitated, then snickered.

“Anyone who's scared to congratulate Zohran publicly or privately is very unlikely to be the nominee for president in 2028,” he said.