It was just past midnight on a mid-October Friday, and Morris Katz was sprawled out on the floor of his firm’s office in downtown Brooklyn, a warm six-pack of Bud Light within easy reach. Katz could not be blamed for needing a drink.

Here in New York, things were going pretty well. Katz, as Zohran Mamdani ’s top adviser, was on the verge of completing an astonishing victory—though Andrew Cuomo was ratcheting up his fear-mongering attacks and the pressure to avoid mistakes was building as Election Day approached.

Up in Maine, however, the chaos was escalating. Katz’s client in the US Senate race, Graham Platner, was confronting damaging daily revelations about old Reddit posts where Platner had declared himself a communist, labeled cops “opportunistic cowards,” seemed to bla

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