People hear the name “Morris Katz” and picture a balding, 75-year-old accountant. “I get that quite frequently,” he says with a laugh. Instead, Katz is a curly-haired, baby-faced, high-energy 28-year-old political strategist and one of the masterminds of Zohran Mamdani’s surprising victory in June’s Democratic New York City mayoral primary.
To become the city’s youngest mayor since 1889, the 33-year-old Mamdani needs to win again in November’s general election, where he’s the favorite but will probably be facing three opponents and an onslaught of attacks funded by billionaires. No matter who wins, though, this year is likely to be remembered in New York politics as the Gen-Z election—as in Z for Zohran, but also because of the outsized role that younger operatives and voters are playing in shaping the race.
Curtis Sliwa, the 71-year-old red-bereted Republican candidate, has put his bid in the hands of 25-year-old campaign manager Rusat Ramgopal, who in 2023 ran unsuccessfully for a Queens city council seat. “Mamdani isn’t the only one with young staffers,” Ramgopal says after accompanying Sliwa to a campaign event at a Chinese church in Flushing. Indeed, those staffers include 21-year-old college senior Ashwin Prabaharan, Sliwa’s director of youth engagement and volunteer coordinator. “In a typical campaign, I think a candidate of Curtis’s age would have been sidelined trying to relate to people my age,” Prabaharan says. “But he’s put young people front and center ever since he started his work with the Guardian Angels. So he understands exactly what affordability and public safety are supposed to be about for kids my age. And inside the campaign, we’re not just manning the phones. Kids like me have real responsibility.”
Partly that’s because the eccentric Sliwa is a longshot in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly six to one. But it’s also because the candidate thinks younger voters will determine the election. “The only way to stop [Mamdani’s] momentum,” Sliwa has said, “is go in the neighborhoods where he clobbered [Andrew] Cuomo and recruit millennials and Gen Z’ers to my point of view.”
Indeed, the primary race was defined by the striking contrast between Cuomo, the 67-year-old former governor, who held a minimal number of events and rode around in his Dodge Charger, and Mamdani, who literally dashed around city streets while making high-energy social media videos. Cuomo and the 64-year-old incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, are both planning to be on the ballot this fall as independents, and both men can point to millennials among their top advisers—including Melissa DeRosa, 42, on Cuomo’s team and Eugene Noh, Adams’s campaign manager, who is in his early thirties.
Yet the age of those staffers is less significant than the fact that most of them have spent their professional lives working in conventional, establishment New York politics—and that the personalities of their candidates are still moored to the 1980s and 1990s. Cuomo, for instance, has brought on a new social media team for the general election and has tried to convey a looser, hipper image, with sometimes awkward results, including breaking out his skills as a former tow truck driver to jump-start a stranger’s car. “Oh, I have been enjoying Cuomo’s TikTok presence,” Katz says, “but probably not for the reasons they would like someone to be enjoying it.”
“You’re not going to be able to out-Mamdani Mamdani on social media, but we’ve upped our game there too,” says Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi, though he declined to name the new members of the Cuomo social media team. “If [Mamdani] wins and, as suspected, he’s not able to achieve what he promised, all it’s going to do is disillusion this generation for a generation.”
The leadership of Mamdani’s campaign, while not purely composed of political outsiders, is steeped in the internet culture and populist politics of the past two decades. Andrew Epstein, 38, created the breakthrough videos with Mamdani. Speechwriting director Julian Gerson, 28, suggested that Mamdani walk the length of Manhattan days before the primary vote. Elle Bisgaard-Church, his 34-year-old primary campaign manager, “shares a brain” with Mamdani, says a senior campaign operative, and constructed a volunteer army of 50,000 people. Senior adviser Zara Rahim, 34, prioritized Mamdani’s outreach to Muslim and South Asian communities.
