Actor Cynthia Nixon, best known as Miranda Hobbes in the hit HBO show “Sex and the City,” is being considered as a possible challenger to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) in the 2018 primaries.
Nixon has criticized Cuomo’s policies and during a spring episode of the talk show “The View” said the governor “is short-changing the children of New York state. He is not against public schools but he doesn’t like to pay for them.”
Cuomo “is a little more like Betsy DeVos than we like to think he is,” she added.
Nixon has compared Cuomo to President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education DeVos on a number of other occasions.
“He also wants to increase the number of privately-run charter schools in New York City by more than 50 percent. And he has been a loud proponent of private school tax credits, essentially a backdoor voucher system. These are policies we expect from Betsy DeVos, but from Andrew Cuomo?” Nixon wrote in an op-ed in March.
Cuomo is planning on running next year for a third term as New York’s governor and has been under attack from progressives in the state. And his hold on the office hasn’t been ironclad.
In 2014, liberal professor Zephyr Teachout won 34 percent of the vote in her primary bid against Cuomo.
“In the last few years there’s been an earthquake in American politics, and Andrew Cuomo could well be surprised,” Teachout told the Wall Street Journal.
Other potential rivals for the 2018 Democratic primary are Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner and former state legislator Terry Gipson.
“Governor Cuomo has the strongest progressive record of any elected official in this country—period—and we look forward to building on that record in the third term,” Bill Mulrow, Cuomo’s 2018 campaign chairman, told the Journal in response.
