Cynthia Nixon Enters Race for New York Governor

 

The actress Cynthia Nixon officially jumped into the race for governor of New York on Monday, setting off what promises to be a tumultuous six months as she challenges Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in this year’s Democratic primary.

Ms. Nixon, 51, has never before run for elected office and has chosen a huge undertaking for her first bid: seeking to unseat a two-term incumbent (and son of a three-term governor) who is sitting atop more than $30 million in campaign cash.

The contest will likely become one of the marquee Democratic primaries in the nation, as Ms. Nixon is widely expected to challenge Mr. Cuomo from the political left. Her campaign immediately cast Mr. Cuomo as a “centrist and Albany insider,” and some of her initial rhetoric on inequality echoed Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We are now the most unequal state in the entire country, with both incredible wealth and extreme poverty,” she said in a video posted on Twitter announcing her candidacy.

Splashed across the top of her website are more hints of her campaign’s coming focus. One of the five categories — along with “Meet Cynthia” and “Donate” — is a hashtag: #CuomosMTA, a term used often by critics of the governor for New York’s faltering subway system run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Scenes of her riding the subways are also spliced in her opening ad.

Ms. Nixon, best known for her work in the “Sex and the City” franchise, is expected to lean heavily on her star power and ability to draw media attention in ways that most traditional challengers could not.

Within 18 minutes of posting her announcement video on Monday, she was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in New York, and then nationwide 20 minutes after that. Her video topped 1 million views on Twitter alone by the evening.

But her campaign may test the appetite of New Yorkers for a celebrity leader in the age of President Trump, a deeply unpopular figure here among Democrats. While Ms. Nixon has been an education activist for many years her fame could cut both ways in the coming months.

Mr. Cuomo has downplayed the challenge in recent days, even as his political operation has busily sought to burnish his progressive credentials.

“I’m not nervous about whoever runs,” Mr. Cuomo said last week. “There’ll be people who run. That’s called elections, and that’s fine.”

If elected, Ms. Nixon would become the first female governor, and the first openly gay governor, in New York history.

“Our leaders are letting us down,” she said in the announcement video.

“Something has to change,” she said in the ad. “We want our government to work again, on health care, ending mass incarceration, fixing our broken subway. We are sick of politicians who care more about headlines and power than they do about us. It can’t just be business as usual anymore.”

The language on her website was more aggressive. There, she accused Mr. Cuomo of “inhumane budgets” and of “selling New York off to the highest bidder.”