The Platner Hangover
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." - Al Pacino, The Godfather III
It appears people have more to say about the Graham Platner fiasco.
In late July, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed Platner campaign strategist Morris Katz. “After months of debating what the lessons of Platner’s sudden rise were, now it’s all about the lessons of his even more sudden fall,” Klein began. “And every faction has a lesson it wants the other to learn.”
Per Klein, establishment Democrats conclude inexperienced, outside-the-Beltway operatives from the populist wing of the party are completely incapable of vetting candidates. “Look at how Platner fell apart under scrutiny,” they sneer. “What if that had happened after the date when Maine’s Democratic Party couldn’t choose a new candidate?”
For their part, populists “want to protect what Platner seemed to be proving before his implosion: that the Democratic establishment is intensely vulnerable, that it’s out of touch with the electorate.”
Both groups, however, have something in common: They’re angry with a guy named Morris Katz, of the Fight Agency. The “knives are out” for the 20-something operative who helped Zohran Mamdani become mayor of New York.
“Katz made genuinely huge mistakes. It is very possible that the failure to effectively vet Platner could have cost Democrats the Senate this year. Katz has also clearly figured out something about this political moment that strategists many years his senior have not.”
“I think a lot of the critiques and anger are fully valid,” Katz began.
However, he continued, there is “no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign.” He noted that no one caught the shenanigans of Rep. Eric Swalwell, who had served in Congress for a decade, until he was well into his campaign for California governor.
Klein asked directly about the “vetting document” an opposition research firm prepared on Platner before the campaign got underway. Katz replied:
“The document found a Reddit account. Essentially, there was the inclination that there were problematic posts on Reddit, not the full degree of what later came out, but that was the extent of what that document found.
An even more robust process would have found more of the specific Reddit comments and, potentially, the tattoo.
But again, a standard vetting process probably doesn’t uncover most of the things that came after.”
Klein then read from one of Platner’s 2013 Reddit posts, regarding victims of sexual assault:
Holy [expletive], how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so [expletive] up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?
“I think it should have been a red line,” Katz replied.
Because Katz and his colleagues were aware only of “sexting, Reddit and tattoo land,” Platner deserves some of the blame for what happened next:
For all the conversation about vetting, part of what the vetting process requires is a lot of honesty and transparency from candidates. When, as a team, you go to them and say: Hey, we need you to tell us everything — part of what didn’t work in this instance is when there was not full transparency.
He has a point. Campaign managers will need to find a way to encourage candidates and their families to be more transparent with their oppo researchers.
That won’t be easy. Campaign consultants and staff are “rented strangers,” to borrow a phrase from Trail Fever, Michael Lewis’ excellent book about the 1996 presidential campaign. Candidates will wonder: If I open up, what’s to prevent this person I barely know from quitting the campaign and spilling the beans?
Klein also asked Katz to respond to something Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald, has asserted: That she pitched Katz and Fight Agency for additional, but ran into a brick wall. Katz said he did not recall that conversation, but agreed she was right to think something was “amiss.” Katz added:
Fight is not a vetting agency. That’s not a service we offer. We work with campaigns, and campaigns work with vetting professionals. I think there’s a fair critique of Fight putting more pressure and me putting more pressure on people to ensure that the vetting process taking place is responsible and robust.
As this column noted earlier, the campaign spent a whopping $6,250 on a “risk assessment memo” and “additional limited vetting.”
When the 2026 midterms are in the rear-view mirror and campaigns complete their financial reporting, we will learn whether Fight and other general consultants ensured their oppo research budgets were “responsible and robust.”