ALBANY - Cynthia Nixon wasted no time attacking Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his policies after launching her bid to unseat him.
The 'Sex and the City' star made a big splash when she post her first political video March 19 that's since been viewed more than 2.5 million times on Twitter.
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The political rookie, however, will face questions about her inexperience in government and whether she's qualified to be executive of the country's fourth-largest state as she runs in the Democratic primary this September.
Cuomo's campaign has pointed to his list of progressive accomplishments, including the approval of same-sex marriage in 2011, a law that will boost the minimum wage to $15 in the coming years and the state's first paid-family-leave program.
But Nixon, a longtime education activist, has already laid out the case for her campaign and why she thinks Cuomo is undeserving of a third term.
Here's a look at what issues Nixon will focus on as she tries to defeat a powerful incumbent governor with more than $30 million in his campaign account.
The Subways
Subway riders haven't been happy with Cuomo for months.
Nixon's trying to tap in to their anger.
Cuomo has significant oversight of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the entity that runs the New York City subway system.
Subway riders haven't been shy to express their displeasure with the condition of the city's heavily used, often-hobbled train system, taking to social media in droves to place blame on Cuomo.
"I got here just in the nick of time," Nixon said to open her first campaign speech Tuesday. "I allowed an hour and a half for what should have been a 30 minute ride. Cuomo's MTA."
#CuomosMTA has been a popular place on Twitter and other social-media platforms to vent about subway delays and cancellations.
Nixon herself has piled on: Her campaign website has an entire section devoted to #CuomosMTA.
For his part, Cuomo has tried to shift blame to New York City. The city is led by his foe, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is close with Nixon.
He's faulted the city for not picking up the tab for half of an $836 million subway-improvement plan put forward by Joseph Lhota, Cuomo's hand-picked MTA chairman.
"Everyone praises the plan," Cuomo said Tuesday.
"It’s an $800 million plan. The state says we’ll fund our half. New York City’s refused to fund their half. That means the plan has not been able to go forward as it should."
Income inequality
Nixon's focus on income inequality in the early days of her campaign has been Bernie Sanders-esque.
That's not a coincidence.
Nixon is trying to garner support from the same kind of progressive Democrats that Sanders successfully courted during his 2016 presidential primary bid.
Some of New York's upstate cities — Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, in particular — have among the worst poverty rates in the nation.
"New York state itself is the single most unequal state in the country," Nixon said Tuesday.
"The top 1 percent of New Yorkers earn 45 times what the other 99 percent combined."
Nixon has already shown she's fond of citing that statistic on the top 1 percent of earners of New York.
It's from a 2016 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based, liberal-leaning think tank.
Small donors
Cynthia Nixon extolled her New York roots in a video announcing her candidacy for governor.
Cuomo is a prodigious political fundraiser, racking up a $30 million campaign war chest as of January.
Very few of Cuomo's contributions, however, come from small donors. Instead he relies on deep-pocketed supporters, many with various interests before the state.
Nixon is trying to exploit that.
In a press release Wednesday, Nixon boasted her campaign received 2,214 contributions of less than $200 in the first 24 hours.
That's more small-dollar donations than Cuomo has received since taking office in 2011, according to PolitiFact. (If you were to add Cuomo's 2010 campaign in, Cuomo would have more, however.)
In her speech Tuesday, Nixon noted Cuomo's taken in about 0.1 percent of his total campaign money from small-dollar donors, as The New York Times noted earlier this year.
"So if you’re a regular person in New York, the chance that Andrew Cuomo is going to care about your concerns is exactly that – 0.1 percent," Nixon said.
Cuomo said his campaign has focused on a different kind of fundraising and will target small donors as the race moves ahead, according to Spectrum News' NY1.
Republican Senate
The GOP's last hold on power in New York is the state Senate.
Nixon says it's Cuomo's fault it remains that way.
She faulted Cuomo for two things: Allowing a breakaway caucus of eight Democrats to remain allied with Republicans and allowing Republican-drawn district lines to take effect in 2012 despite previously pledging to veto them.
"I voted for Andrew Cuomo because I believed that he was a real Democrat," Nixon said. "But since taking office he has shown us his true colors."
Cuomo has denied he had anything to do with the Senate Independent Democratic Conference's 2012 decision to ally itself with the GOP, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement that gave Republicans the majority in 2013 and 2014.
Now, Republicans have a one-vote majority on their own with the help of Sen. Simcha Felder, a Queens Democrat who sits with the GOP.
The state Democratic Committee, which Cuomo controls, has brokered a deal that could see Democrats take control of the Senate if Assemblywoman Shelley Mayer, D-Yonkers, wins a special election next month over Republican Julie Killian for a Senate district in Westchester County.
But that's not a given: It would require Felder to stop sitting with the GOP, and for the IDC to rejoin with mainline Democrats in a power-sharing deal.
'Unqualified lesbian'
A day into Nixon's campaign, a top Cuomo surrogate made an unforced error that Nixon is likely to revisit in the coming weeks and months.
Christine Quinn, the Cuomo-appointed vice chair of the state Democratic Committee, tried to make the case to the New York Post that Nixon — making her first run for elective office — is unqualified for the job of governor.
Her choice of words, however, is what made the headlines.
“Cynthia Nixon was opposed to having a qualified lesbian become mayor of New York City," Quinn said, referring to Nixon's 2013 decision to support Bill de Blasio over her in the New York City mayor's race.
"Now she wants an unqualified lesbian to be the governor of New York. You have to be qualified and have experience. She isn’t qualified to be the governor,”
Both Quinn and Nixon are openly gay.
Quinn later apologized for calling Nixon an "unqualified lesbian," but said she does believe Nixon is unqualified to be governor.
Nixon pounced.
"When I announced yesterday that I’m running for governor, one of Cuomo’s top surrogates dismissed me as an 'unqualified lesbian,'" she said at a campaign kick-off event Wednesday.
"It’s true that I never received my certificate from the Department of Lesbian Affairs, though in my defense there’s a lot of paperwork required.”
