Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman plans to hire the controversial progressive consulting group Fight Agency to produce television advertisements for her mayoral campaign, a spokesperson said Wednesday, drawing a quick condemnation from the rival campaign of L.A. mayor Karen Bass.
Fight Agency is best known for its work on campaigns for New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and for Graham Platner, the former Democratic primary candidate for a Maine Senate seat who withdrew after a woman claimed he sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the allegation.
That incident, which followed reporting on Platner’s troubled relationships with some women and his Nazi symbol tattoo, drew scrutiny to Fight Agency and one of its consultants, Morris Katz.
Several hundred members of the leftist Democratic Socialists of America have called on political candidates and elected officials to boycott both the Fight Agency and Katz.
Raman campaign officials began speaking with Fight Agency in February, a campaign spokesperson said, though they did not hire Fight Agency during the primary. The spokesperson said that no contract has yet been signed.
“We plan on working with Fight Agency,” the spokesperson said. “We understand that they had also been approached by other campaigns and committees involved in the L.A. mayor’s race.”
A spokesperson for the Bass campaign said they never tried to hire Fight Agency and that nobody ever met with them. Fight Agency spokesman Michael Mikail disputed that, saying a person affiliated with Bass sought to set up a meeting with the firm last spring, but that no meeting ever took place.
Another person allied with Bass contacted Fight Agency last month about working for the Bass campaign, Mikail said, which the firm declined.
“We decided to make ads for the campaign that actually believes in taking on a broken status quo and a corrupt political establishment to finally make things work in L.A. again,” Mikail said.
Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack said no one officially associated with the campaign ever tried to hire Fight Agency.
“This is a distraction,” Stack said. “Nithya Raman’s decision to hire Fight Agency is a major liability for her candidacy and another example of putting her political ambition first.”
Mike Trujillo, a consultant who plans to work on an independent expenditure group supporting Karen Bass, said that Raman should take the internal DSA letter calling on candidates not to work with Fight Agency seriously.
“The Fight Agency successfully was able to spin for months Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo on his chest, him interacting with neo-Nazis on internet as a candidate for Senate,” he said. “Now they get to spin Nithya Raman’s record on reopening dangerous homeless encampments.”
Fight Agency is known for making some of the slick videos that helped propel Mamdani’s campaign. Katz was the lead media strategist and helped make the ads for that campaign.
Following the DSA internal letter, Mamdani said he would continue working with Katz, who is one of the mayor’s top advisors and received glowing coverage for his consulting work before the Platner campaign.
The letter from DSA members was not endorsed by a specific chapter of the group, but did include signatures of top members of the organization, according to the New York Times.
Raman is a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the DSA, which endorsed her City Council campaigns but hasn’t yet made an endorsement in the mayor’s race. Chapter officials had no immediate comment on the Raman campaign’s plan to hire Fight Agency.
The post Raman campaign plans to hire controversial strategy group that advised Graham Platner appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
