Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome to the show.

He was the lead media strategist for Zohran Mamdani's campaign for mayor.

He's based on the Democratic Strategy Firm Fight Agency,

where he's worked with other populist upstarts like Graham Platner and Dan Osborne.

He used to lie about his age, but now he's comfortable telling people that he's 26 and a half years old.

Morris Katz.

What's up, Morris?

Nice to be here, Tim.

I'm two months until my birthday. So we're well

into three quarters, right? Yeah, 26 and three quarters. Yeah. Oh, wow, good for you. Congratulations.

I'm very happy for you. I hope I get invited to the party. We've got a bunch to talk about the Texas

Senate primaries. We've got to talk about Graham and Zoron. But for people who aren't familiar with your lore, where did you come from? Like, how did a 26 and 3 quarters year old man end up as Zoron's wingman at the White House?

Pretty randomly. I grew up in Lower Manhattan. Both my parents are kind of in the arts or arts adjacent. I always thought that I was going to be a TV writer, screenwriter, a playwright like my father, and then was writing about kind of a variety of things and had written this profile about a woman who was running for office in North Carolina. I'd always liked politics, but it was kind of like a, you know, hobby, following it the way I followed the New York Knicks or something, but I never dreamed of being on the bench with the Knicks. And the candidate reached out to me afterwards and was like, this really captured my voice in campaign vision. Would you ever think about coming and working for me? And it was during COVID, I was like... How did she find it? Did you post it? I was like writing a number of different things. I'd reached out to her because it seemed like an interesting story. And as soon as she read it, she was like, this is great. Which I guess is an interesting like avenue to get hired places to write glowing profiles about people and then be like can I

have a job but then went to North Carolina and like you really informed the part that I think you

to appreciate of it is we did this hundred county hundred day tour that kind of inform my entire

political identity in some ways of like you know in hindsight I was such an idiot of we, you know,

kind of pushing the can of like, we should be talking about the Green New Deal and UBI.

And, you know, we're in all these rural counties in North Canada, 80, 20 Trump counties.

And you see like, you say like some of this language in people's eyes, you know,

clouds over there like checked out. And language in people's eyes, you know, class over there, like, checked out.

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