The latest polling for Cynthia Nixon shows that she’s taken a fat cut out of what once was a very wide lead for Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo. Quinnipiac’s latest poll of the race, released Wednesday, shows Cuomo ahead by 22 points—with 50 percent of the vote, to Nixon’s 28 percent.
The gap she’ll have to bridge by the primary in September is not insignificant, but it’s a lot smaller than it was. The first Siena College poll, conducted before Nixon had officially entered the race, had her down by 47 points, and polls since then have shown her deficit closer to 50 points than 20. “Actress Cynthia Nixon is a nuisance to Gov. Andrew Cuomo as he seeks a third term,” said Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown. “But at this stage she is not running strong enough to make either the Democratic primary or general election challenge successful.”
However, the summer months ahead may not be smooth sailing for the incumbent: Cuomo’s cabinet will be on trial for corruption. This feeds into a pre-existing weakness for the governor: Voters are evenly split on his trustworthiness, with only 46 percent saying he is honest and trustworthy, while 45 percent think he isn’t.
And Nixon intends to target another one of Cuomo’s soft spots: non-white voters. In an early April appearance on The Wendy Williams Show, Nixon called black women “the backbone of the Democratic party.” According to Christina Greer, Fordham political scientist and author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream, “It’s the first time anyone’s directly courted black women.” While Nixon may not be successful, she added, “Her effort is significant—because no one’s really tried to win this way.” Even Nixon’s embrace of legalizing marijuana, was done through the frame of racial politics: “We have to stop putting people of color in jail for something that white people do with impunity.”
Until Wednesday, when Quinnipiac rolled out its poll and Democracy for America announced its Nixon endorsement, the big news for Nixon had been staffing changes: She appointed a new campaign manager from within the same consultancy that helped launch her run. But she also hired senior adviser L. Joy Williams—a veteran political consultant who heads Brooklyn’s NAACP chapter and founded Higher Heights for America, a PAC dedicated to helping African-American women run for office.
On a visit in late March to a largely black NYCHA housing project that had fallen into disrepair, Nixon hugged a distressed woman who approached her complaining of the conditions in her building. The week after, Cuomo visited the same housing project and announced an expedited repair schedule. But when a resident tried to approach him, Greer says, he walked right past the woman. Bernie Sanders was similarly cold, Greer recalls, when he regaled African-American audiences with tales from his college activist days.
Nixon, on the other hand, “She’s not trying to say, ‘I’ve been a civil rights leader,’ the way Bernie Sanders was.” Greer said: “She’s saying, ‘I’ve been in activist circles in New York City and what I’ve noticed in the past few years and these past few months is that you all—meaning black women—you all are holding party together. That’s interesting.’”
Black women tend vote in higher numbers than their male counterparts, according to a Higher Heights for America study of 2016 primary voters. And yet their concerns tend not to be the frame Democratic primary campaigns.
What makes Nixon’s play for minority voters so interesting is that progressive Democrats usually run much better among white liberals. Cuomo’s 2014 primary challenger, Zephyr Teachout, bested him in a surprising number of upstate enclaves and in the city’s whitest precincts, but lost handily in areas with higher minority populations. Predominantly black neighborhoods in Southeast Queens and central Brooklyn overwhelming chose the more centrist Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, whose national deficit among African-Americans cost him the nomination.
In the Trump-era, with Democrats clamoring to win back working-class whites, progressives worry that their 2018 candidates will overlook black voters just as they did two years ago. Nixon has made it clear that she does not intend to repeat that mistake.
