“I have come to Albany mad as hell about Republicans, and I have come to Albany mad as hell about Democrats,” said Cynthia Nixon in a speech in Albany Monday. Knowingly or not, she was quoting the movie Network, a dark 1976 satire of TV’s corrupt command of America.
In the opening scenes, a newsman goes rogue: “I want you to get up right now and go to the window,” he commands the viewers at home. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!'”
Nixon’s speech went on, “And now I’ve come to Albany to join my brothers and sisters here today and say: It’s time for a change!” But she’d also come to Albany by way of her TV fame. Nixon had announced her primary challenge to Andrew Cuomo exactly a week before. A progressive activist and a star of Sex and the City, she’s the first celebrity candidate to mount a credible run for public office since the last presidential election.
She’s hardly the first, of course. “If you’re Cynthia Nixon and you look around and you see that people of her stature, with her kind of experience were elected governor of California and, and you might look at that reasonably and say, ‘That’s a good plan for me,'” said Ester Fuchs, a Columbia University professor of political science and a city official under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It’s also true that the the issues driving Nixon’s activism and now her campaign—state funding for education, labor relations, and transportation infrastructure—are best advanced from Albany, Fuchs added. Not without a note of skepticism, given Nixon’s inexperience with executive roles, Fuchs allowed it’s unwise to brush off the challenge as “silly,” which Governor Cuomo did in his first comments since after Nixon declared.
Indeed, in the days since her official announcement, concern over her inexperience couldn’t catch up with columns calling her a credible challenger and news stories treating her like the real thing.
It’s silly to call a TV star “silly” when she runs for office in 2018, lest she win in a “stunning upset” six months later and make us look far sillier. And now, even with frenzied Oprah speculation on pause and Ashley Judd yet to renew her Senate run, the rise of the celebrity politician is a foregone guarantee. As is the need to take their candidacies seriously.
But starpower might not get her as far in New York as it would elsewhere. Cuomo is the son of a known and loved Democratic dynasty, and “New Yorkers tend not to be starstruck,” Fuchs says. A Siena College poll, conducted before she announced, showed an uphill 66-19 spread. To her advantage, though: Nixon comes from a different class of celebrity candidate than buzzed-about potential campaigns like Kid Rock for Senate or Oprah, Dwayne Johnson, Kanye West, and Tom Hanks for 2020. From her announcement last week, through her strategically targeted first handful of speeches and media appearances, and even her conveniently obstructed subway travel between rallies, she’s put on a savvy and substantive show. And her case against crony capitalism and for the needs of New Yorkers plays to authentic grievances like the city’s struggling subway system, a flagging upstate economy, and a series of corruption scandals dogging a governor whose national ambitions are no secret—and whose feud with the mayor has a way of making him seem unserious.
Plus, she needs less to grow an entirely new following than to build on a genuinely representative public persona. Her first campaign ad introduced a candidate political New Yorkers already knew as a prominent progressive activist. And TV audiences knew the willful women she’s played onscreen. The best known of these, Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City, was the most independent and least coiffed of four successful women in New York. (However unlike the real Cynthia Nixon she may be, Miranda would be a better governor than her three best friends.) And Nixon actually played a liberal activist on another show, as the daughter of dark horse presidential candidate Jack Tanner in the miniseries mockumentary that chronicled his fictional campaign.
Nixon’s character in Tanner 88, that of the candidate’s 19-year-old apartheid-protesting daughter, aligns pretty well with her political persona as we know it so far. And, she’s made enough of a splash already to refocus the race on the progressive Democrats whom Cuomo has disappointed. From his election in 2010, Cuomo allied with Republicans while the state’s liberal base moved left. Courting them with a $15 minimum wage, paid leave, and free college hasn’t universally won back those who see a favorably progressive leader in Cuomo’s rival, and Nixon’s ally, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.
It’s not uncommon for primary challengers to push incumbent governors leftward, like Cuomo’s virtually unknown challenger Zephyr Teachout did in 2014’s surprisingly competitive primary. But with Cuomo’s left already raw, exposed, and stretched just about to the breaking point, Nixon starts well ahead of Teachout four years ago. Add to this equation the likelihood that the state’s Working Families Party may prefer Nixon to Cuomo, and her celebrity seems almost an afterthought. New Yorkers may not fall for celebrities as easily as Californians, Minnesotans or Americans at large, per Fuchs, but they arguably elected a celebrity senator in Hillary Clinton whose persona depends, in spirit if not in slogan, on the star status she gained as a long-suffering first lady.
Plus, as Harry Enten points out in a recent column for CNN, a primary challenger has come further in less time: Ned Lamont defeated Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic primary thanks in large part to a growing popular distaste for the Iraq War, which Lieberman supported. Although he went on to win back his seat as a third-party candidate and continued to caucus with the Democrats as before, Lamont’s challenge linked Lieberman to an out-of-favor status quo.
The Democratic establishment resents her running in a high-stakes midterm year. “The political class is unhappy about this challenge,” Fuchs told me, “Because it will have to defend itself from a challenge that will invariably be an attack.” Anti-establishment celebrity candidates do seem to have a way of riling up the electorate.
Cuomo contra-Nixon looks a lot less attractive to Democrats sick of an establishment candidates taking their votes for granted. He looked particularly Clintonian when he dismissed Nixon’s announcement as another bug on the windshield in the election cycle’s “silly season.” Outsider candidates gather strength from the arrogance of the people and positions in power—and, as recent years have taught us, there’s no stronger outsider candidate than the celebrity we already know.
