Meet the strategy firm behind Zohran Mamdani’s blistering New York campaign

There's a motto that the partners at Fight Agency, the strategy firm that represents New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, take seriously.

The campaign that's having more fun is often the winner. 

It’s a philosophy that the group of consultants have brought not only to Mamdani's campaign but to those of other candidates including Gina Hinojosa, who is running for governor of Texas, and Graham Platner, who is running for the Senate in Maine.

“We need to usher back in a politics of possibility,” said Morris Katz, one of the partners at Fight Agency, along with prominent strategists Rebecca Katz, Julian Mulvey, and Tommy McDonald.

Fight Agency is setting itself and Mamdani up in a way they say could help Democrats learn lessons about what went wrong during the 2024 election cycle and how to rebuild their party with more appealing candidates and a stronger message.

The new firm’s partners in the past led campaigns for a number of unconventional, scrappy candidates including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

Now they are providing guidance for Mamdani, who has come out of nowhere to become the favorite to be New York City’s next mayor.

If Mamdani wins, Fight Agency believes they will prove again that a candidate with a clear, authentic message and brand can prevail no matter the odds.

Morris Katz said the broader narrative on Mamdani’s campaign is, “Life doesn’t have to be this hard. New York can be more affordable and it's government's job to deliver that.” 

“If you watch Zohran’s launch video, and then you watch the first ad of the primary campaign and then if you look at our messaging in the general, it has been the same campaign the entire campaign,” Katz said. “And we are not the first campaign to do it, but I think it’s something that has been lost a little bit in the flow of modern campaigns.” 

Reinventing the playbook for Democrats also means moving past “the days of a thousand points of broadcast TV alone being the battlefront on which campaigns are fought,” Katz said.  

The strategists also took a canvassing approach not just to door knocking but to paid media. This fall, they tailored Mamdani’s ad campaign to prime-time programming ranging from New York Knicks games to NBC’s "Law & Order" and ABC’s "The Golden Bachelor." 

“New York, will you accept this rose?” Mamdani says in one spot, echoing the famous "Bachelor" line. 

During opening night for the Knicks last week, Mamdani aired an ad declaring “New York, this is our year,” while showing a pickup basketball game in black and white. 

And while Mamdani is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, his campaign is also running ads on Fox News. 

“It isn’t just a cute gimmick,” said one source familiar with the firm’s strategy. “It’s a gesture that we believe every single voter is [worthwhile]. We don’t expect everyone to meet us where we are. We’re going to come to where you are.” 

Mamdani’s campaign this week became the first to hold a press conference specifically for “content creators and new media,” part of an effort to expand their reach beyond news outlets. 

The news conference — which included more than 70 ‘creators’ — generated more than 31,000 livestreams and had a combined reach in the tens of millions, his campaign said. 

Sources close to the Mamdani campaign say there are lessons to be learned from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in last year’s presidential race.

“The main thing was there was no larger story of the Harris campaign and when there's no larger story that's when you're vulnerable to attack on a brand and it's when you're vulnerable to losing people who have been with you,” one source close to the campaign said. “It's when everything starts to kind of slip away. When there's not a fabric holding things together.” 

The source pointed to how Harris worked at McDonald’s when she was in her 20s, but President Trump owned the narrative by giving out orders at a drive-thru in Pennsylvania one day.

“That's malpractice,” the source said. “There's a story of this real person who understands how hard it is in an economy that's only getting harder who's had to take on and overcome realities of a broken status quo their entire life. And yet none of that was communicated.”

Mamdani hasn’t faced those problems, and some Democrats point to the strategy team around him. 

Rebecca Katz, one of the Fight partners, is used to imperfect campaigns and nontraditional candidates. 

She gained notoriety when she helped Fetterman win a tough Senate campaign in 2022. Katz later went on to help Gallego win a seat in the upper chamber after another nail-biter.  

“The secret sauce is that she and her team can do cool sh-- and aren’t 100 years old,” said Democratic strategist Eddie Vale. “But also she has worked on a ton of real campaigns and knows how to win in non-lefty places.”

Mamdani holds a sizable lead in polls against Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who is running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa. 

An Emerson College/Pix 11/The Hill poll out on Thursday showed Mamdani with a 25 point lead over Cuomo, with 50 percent support to the former governor's 25 percent, while a Quinnipiac University poll showed Mamdani with a 10 point lead. 

At a time when Democrats are trying to find their way back from the devastating losses of 2024 and are trying to rebuild, Morris Katz said Mamdani has taught some lessons and has served as an inspiration to his party. 

“I think he has helped challenge the party on the ways in which it communicates, and I think he’s helped to reinvigorate the party,” Morris Katz said, adding that the candidate helps “give clarity and a focus on an affordability crisis that can’t be ignored.”