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Cynthia Nixon enters race for New York Governor

NEW YORK — 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.

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

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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 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 Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in New York among Democrats. While Nixon has been an education activist for many years her fame could cut both ways in the coming months.

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,” Cuomo said last week. “There’ll be people who run. That’s called elections, and that’s fine.”

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If elected, 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 Cuomo of “inhumane budgets” and of “selling New York off to the highest bidder.”

Cuomo begins the race as a heavy front-runner. A Siena College poll Monday had him leading Nixon among registered Democrats 66 percent to 19 percent. But an ugly primary could affect the governor beyond 2018, should he run for president in 2020.

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Jefrey Pollock, a longtime pollster for Cuomo, was dismissive of Nixon, saying that Democratic voters are especially uninterested in celebrity leaders in the current political climate, and prefer candidates who can “counter what they see as the chaos of the inexperienced.”

“They are looking for proven experience to take the fight to Donald Trump and to Republicans across the state,” he said.

Four years ago, Zephyr Teachout, a virtually unknown law professor, jolted the New York political scene when she scored more than 34 percent of the vote in her run against Cuomo, who largely ignored her. Teachout has signed on as Nixon’s campaign treasurer.

Cuomo has remained a polarizing figure, particularly among Democratic activists, even as he has increasingly shifted leftward in recent years, enacting a minimum-wage increase, paid family leave and free college tuition scholarships for middle-class families.

A powerful figure known for his long memory, Cuomo is expected to consolidate much of the institutional support across the state, from labor unions to business leaders to major donors. (Last week, before Nixon officially entered the contest, the New York arm of the National Organization for Women endorsed the governor.)

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For Nixon, that likely means she must run an insurgent campaign, and early indications are she will focus on digital organizing. She has tapped as campaign manager Nicole Aro, a former digital strategist for the AFL-CIO.

Tim Tagaris, who served as digital fundraising director for Sanders’ presidential campaign, has also signed on to help Nixon, according to two people familiar with the situation.

In addition, Bill Hyers and Rebecca Katz, two former strategists for Mayor Bill de Blasio, have been advising Nixon’s campaign.

Cuomo and de Blasio have sparred for years, and the mayor is close to Nixon, who aggressively endorsed his initial candidacy in 2013. Nixon’s wife, Christine Marinoni, recently stepped down from a post in the de Blasio administration.

Cuomo has yet to build out his campaign team, despite his sizable treasury. His campaign manager from his 2010 and 2014 races, Joseph Percoco, was convicted on bribery charges last week in a federal trial.

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Still, he has vast resources at his fingertips. Last week, the state Democratic Party bought $100,000 in television ads touting Cuomo’s efforts on gun control. The party later said Cuomo’s campaign covered the cost.

Born and raised in New York, Nixon attended Hunter College High School and Barnard College while breaking into acting. She is best known for playing Miranda Hobbes on “Sex and the City,” a world-weary lawyer navigating life in late-1990s and early-2000s New York. In a plot twist that now seems quaint, Miranda horrified her friends by moving from a Manhattan apartment to a brownstone in Brooklyn.

Now she will be stumping for votes in both boroughs.

Nixon mostly narrates her opening two-minute video, but as she rides a train in the final moments, the conductor can be heard overhead: “Next stop is Albany.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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SHANE GOLDMACHER © 2018 The New York Times

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