The actress and activist turned progressive challenger to Gov. Andrew Cuomo has consistently run a distant second in the polls, which put his lead in the 30-point range, but will on Wednesday have a grand opportunity -- perhaps her last -- to change the trajectory of their Democratic primary race and put the two-term incumbent on edge ahead of the September 13 vote.
The pair's first and only debate at Hofstra University on Long Island will be Cuomo's first one-on-one faceoff since 2006, when he met Republican Jeanine Pirro ahead of a state attorney general election. The biggest question heading in, given his considerable apparent lead, is whether Cuomo can sit tight -- the pair will both be seated for the duration -- and steer clear of any comment or confrontation that might throw him off course.
"Cuomo tried as hard as he could to pretend that there wasn't a race happening, but the fact that he's actually attending his first primary debate in more than a decade is proof that (Nixon's) run presents a real challenge," said Joe Dinkin, campaigns director for the Working Families Party, which endorsed Nixon and will have her on its ballot line in November. "My guess is that Cuomo's team is prepping him not to lash out and create a moment. His goal will be to make no news."
Not that Cuomo is shying away from pre-debate gamesmanship. On Wednesday afternoon, his campaign unveiled a new ad — which it says will air during the debate — featuring old clips of Nixon praising the governor before she decided to run against him. The move also underlined the fundraising disparity between the two. Nixon has not run a single television ad, instead spending primarily on digital outreach and voter turnout efforts.
In person at the debate, Nixon will likely do her best to prod Cuomo, whom she has labeled "Andrew The Bully," into living up to the nickname. After months on the campaign trail, jabbing away at him at every turn, it would be surprising if she pulled any punches on Wednesday.
"Viewers are going to see that the governor is fundamentally uncomfortable being challenged on his record and that he isn't very equipped to defend things that he's done," Nixon spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said, "because at his core he's done them for political reasons and not out of any higher calling to public service."
Nixon has over the past few months criticized Cuomo over the dire state of the New York City subway system, a pair of corruption convictions that got close to -- but never implicated -- him and, most recently, his refusal to return old campaign donations made by Donald Trump before he became President.
Cuomo has argued that the $64,000 in question is better off being used to aid other Democrats running to oppose the Trump agenda. And he has responded to broader accusations that his record over nearly eight years in office is insufficiently liberal -- or, as Hitt described it, "Republican-lite" -- with a laundry list of achievements, from raising the minimum wage, tightening gun laws and the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state four years before the Supreme Court made it a nationwide right.
What Cuomo has not weighed in on one way or another, his campaign said Tuesday, is the precise temperature the dials will be set to inside the debate hall on Wednesday.
Discussion over the heat, or potential lack thereof, in the hall briefly lit up media coverage ahead of the debate after the New York Times first reported on an email from a top Nixon aide to WCBS, the debate host, asking the room be set to a snug 76 degrees. That number, the Nixon team explained, was as much a starting bid -- Cuomo is known to prefer much cooler climates -- as a note of protest against the process that led up to the debate being, as they said in a statement earlier this month, negotiated without their input and "presented to our campaign on a take-it-or-leave-it basis."
Cuomo spokeswoman Lis Smith hit back at those complaints, saying in a statement, "The Nixon campaign thrives on paranoia and melodrama," dismissing the accusations as "silly" and insisting the governor was focused solely on the meat and potatoes of the debate.
Despite the Nixon campaign's protests over the process that led them here, the debate might end up coming at a fortuitous time after all, following the attention-grabbing victory of progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum in the Florida gubernatorial primary on Tuesday. Gillum edged out the frontrunner, moderate former Rep. Gwen Graham, the daughter of a former governor and senator, by running a grassroots campaign to the left of primary field.
In a tweet late Tuesday, Nixon cast Gillum's come-from-behind win as a sign of things to come.
"Andrew Gillum just won his primary for governor of Florida! Experts said it was impossible. The polls had him at just 16%. We're proving, that if progressives come together, we can win. Now, it is New York's turn," she wrote, including a link asking supporters to "donate to keep our momentum going."
Nixon, though, has a more significant hill to climb, at least according to the polls. She has trailed the two-term incumbent Cuomo by at least 30 percentage points in the most recent round, dating back to last month.
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