In the rush to launch Graham Platner’s Senate bid, Dan Moroff, a progressive up-and-comer and Platner’s top strategist, asked a Democratic research firm to investigate the political novice.
A thorough background investigation of a Senate candidate, which has become standard practice in major races, can take several weeks and cost about $20,000 or a monthly retainer. Moroff asked for a quick, inexpensive review within days, according to people familiar with the matter.
In three days, New York-based Northside Research prepared a brief, risk-assessment memo for Moroff — or the beginning of one — in exchange for a detailed research book that could be hundreds of pages long. Some of them said the accelerated product posed a risk to the campaign, citing some of Plattner’s Reddit posts as the biggest threat to his budding campaign. According to federal disclosures, the firm was paid $6,250, with an additional limited investigation conducted a few days later. They did not conduct candidate interviews or questionnaires.
Less than two weeks later, Plattner announced his bid. Quick research did not find such issues His campaign will suffer laterThat includes Plattner’s Reddit posts or a whole series of sexually explicit texts Plattner sent to other women while they were married.
By plucking an oyster farmer and Marine veteran from obscurity, and then opting for a brief investigative process, Moroff has destabilized the Democratic Party’s hopes of capturing a majority of Senate seats this year. Plattner faced constant scrutiny and a barrage of GOP attacks over old posts, Nazi-related tattoos and his past relationships with women.
It is the latest example of the mix of ambition, arrogance and corner-cutting that Moroff has shown in a political career that has seen some success in elevating populist, Bernie Sanders-style candidates, but also a trail of missteps that have left some political allies feeling betrayed.
An official with the Plattner campaign said they did not have the resources to conduct a more extensive vetting, which the official said would not have yielded much meaningful information.
With disdain for traditional Democratic campaign organizations, Moroff plans to disrupt the party’s ecosystem of consultants and campaign strategists. Over the past decade, he has attempted to prove that he can identify winning candidates better than party leaders and create successful campaigns from scratch by testing his ideas in New York, Pittsburgh, and Nebraska. Those efforts attracted little national attention until this year, as Moroff has now thrust himself into the center of the Maine Senate race, which Democrats widely consider his best chance to flip the Senate seat.
At the core of Moroff’s political philosophy is the belief that voters want outsiders to run for office and are willing to overlook personal transgressions as long as the candidate can connect with them. in main, Plattner won over 70% On the Democratic primary vote this month, he became his party’s Senate nominee.
“Real people living real lives are giving voters what they’ve been hungry for,” Moroff said in a statement. “People want someone who can fight for them, not someone who has been dreaming of power since middle school and living his life accordingly.”
Moraf said that criticism of his management was coming from party insiders in order to “discredit those who oppose his control of a party that is in desperate need of change.”
Plattner’s working-class message and political charisma have spread among Maine voters, and his effort to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins remains competitive despite revelations about her past. But some Democrats fear Plattner’s unknown background could still cost him a loss.
According to people familiar with the matter, some members of Plattner’s family have expressed unhappiness with Moroff’s decision-making, and have raised concerns with some campaign staffers about the race creating long-term problems for Plattner.
According to people familiar with the matter, Moroff handled the continued attacks on the candidate’s previous posts with carelessness. He has told employees, “Only good feelings,” when problems arise.
previous campaigns
Moroff’s supporters call him a brilliant destroyer with a fresh attitude who doesn’t mind rubbing people the wrong way to win. But his work for Plattner fits the pattern of managing past campaigns, according to more than a dozen people who worked with him over the past decade. In particular, scrutiny of candidates has often been a source of tension.
In Pittsburgh, he was involved in Turan Jenkins’ 2018 campaign to take on the county’s District Attorney, Stephen Zappala Jr. Less than a week into his campaign, progressive groups backed away from Jenkins when it emerged that he belonged to a church that held anti-gay views. Jenkins, who lost the election, declined to comment on the race or Moroff.
Moroff said he did a veterinary job for Jenkins that went beyond what he would normally do for a local office.
Brandy Fischer, who leads a police-accountability organization in Pittsburgh, where Moroff worked with progressive groups and a small caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, called the campaign “a debacle.” But she said she held Jenkins responsible, rather than Moroff, for not highlighting the homophobic views that weakened her support.
He acknowledged that Moroff’s work had caused friction with other activists. “Daniel moves fast,” she said. “Daniel makes mistakes because he’s aggressive. Any time you’re a very aggressive, risk-taking guy, things are going to come up.”
In New York, Moroff worked as campaign manager for state Senate candidate Debbie Medina. His admission in 2016 that he had beaten his son with a belt as a child derailed his campaign. This came to light after old testimony from her son’s sentencing hearing in the murder case came to light.
Moroff later said that he received 40.5% of the vote, despite “a huge scandal in the middle of his campaign”. In a 2017 op-ed For a progressive magazine, In These Times. Moroff told The Wall Street Journal that he did not recruit Medina, who had previously run for office.
Most recently in Iowa, Moroff last year recruited another political novice, Nathan Sage, a veteran and former executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, to run for the U.S. Senate. In that race, Moroff also ran a preliminary check rather than a more thorough check. According to people familiar with the matter, campaign staffers wanted to obtain a full opposition research book on their candidate, but Moroff was not interested. Moroff said his standard vet didn’t show any significant flags.
Sage, who dropped out this February, failed to gain enough traction and financial support in a crowded primary.
Sage said that after finding Plattner, Moroff, who unexpectedly came to his workplace and convinced him to run, shifted his attention almost entirely from Iowa to Maine. He would sporadically call and attend meetings to criticize campaign strategy or offer ideas that did not align with Sage’s views and voters in Iowa.
Sage said, “It’s like the kids are making dinner at home and mom isn’t there. But when mom comes home, she’s crazy because they burned something.”
“I think Daniel is goal-oriented, mindset-oriented,” he said. “He’ll go through the wall for people, but he’ll also go through people for his mentality.”
Breaking the ‘progressive blob’
Moroff’s start in politics came as a teenager, when he volunteered for the gubernatorial campaign of Deval Patrick, who became the first black governor of Massachusetts. He later volunteered on the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards before earning a degree in engineering and urban studies from Brown University and then working as a tenant organizer in New York.
It was the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders that set Moroff on his current path. Moroff, who calls himself a Sanders “observer,” meaning he performed unpaid work typically assigned to salaried staffers, says he took two takeaways from the independent senator’s unexpectedly competitive race against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
One conclusion was that a populist candidate could systematically build a campaign without the help of an ecosystem of established progressive groups, which they found ineffective. Moroff said in an interview, “Bernie Sanders comes in and is not part of the progressive blob and does things very differently than the progressive blob, and almost overnight creates something much, much bigger than the progressive blob.”
The second conclusion was that the Democrats were bad at recruiting candidates – and could do better themselves.
He achieved a series of early successes, including recruiting Summer Lee, a recent law school graduate who protested alleged racial bias at a local high school, to run for state representative in western Pennsylvania in 2018 and managing her campaign. She won the race and was later elected to Congress representing the Pittsburgh area in 2022.
Fischer, who leads a police-accountability group in Pittsburgh, called Moroff “brilliant” and credited him with several other electoral successes, replacing centrist Democrats, some of whom supported a “tough on crime” agenda, with a more progressive generation.
After testing candidates in deep blue places like Pittsburgh and hard-to-reach GOP areas like Nebraska, the operative’s entry into battleground races like Maine has created consternation among some Democrats.
Moroff works closely with his fiancée Leanne Fan, whom he met while working for Sanders in 2020. The pair recruited Plattner and Sage together last year. And Moroff, who is affiliated with various consulting firms including Dark Forest LLC and Independent Campaigns LLC, has hired staff to travel the country to seek out other working-class candidates.
‘mad scientist’
Moraff’s policy goals are in line with Sanders’s desire to “fight the oligarchy,” as the Vermont senator often says, and though he has worked on criminal-justice reform issues in the past, people who have worked with Moraff on recent campaigns say he is not as focused on policy specifics. He wants his candidates to support Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as genocide, but beyond that, he doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals.
In Platner’s race, Moroff crowdsourced proposals on the social-media platform Discord from activists who saw it as outsourcing, according to people familiar with the matter. A Plattner campaign official disputed the characterization, saying that Moroff led the development of policy proposals and used Discord as a convenient space for people to share issues they cared about.
Plattner’s campaign, meanwhile, has been hurt by staff turnover since its launch last August, in part because of his past social-media comments and tattoos, but also because of disagreements with Moroff, those people said.
Page Loud, who worked for Plattner before running unsuccessfully for Congress, publicly criticized Moroff in a story on Instagram.
According to people who have worked with the couple, Fan sometimes tries to diffuse any tension between Moroff and the staff. Her engagement ring opens into a small comb that she has used to comb Moroff’s beard.
Plattner still holds Moroff in high regard and follows his advice closely. He expressed surprise that Moroff completed his law degree at Yale University while running his campaign this year. “He’s a mad scientist when it comes to politics,” Plattner told the Journal.
write to tarini party tarini.parti@wsj.com And on Aaron Zeitner aaron.zitner@wsj.com
