Rumors that Cynthia Nixon would mount a challenge to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in New York’s Democratic primary began to surface in early March; by the 20th she had announced her candidacy, and by mid-April she had secured the endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party, which backed the governor, after some sturm and drang, in his two previous elections. Ever since her emergence, the governor has seemed — how to say? — terrified out of his bomber jacket, and has been moving to establish New York as the liberal paradise of a certain kind of voter’s imagination: the kind of voter who would vote for Cynthia Nixon.

Her supporters have described the governor’s increasing shift leftward — delineated below — as “the Cynthia effect,’’ an interpretation of recent events his allies adamantly deny. “The governor’s long record of progressive accomplishment is irrefutable,’’ as Abbey Fashouer, a spokeswoman for the campaign put it (forgetting perhaps that a few years ago, Mr. Cuomo bragged that, fiscally speaking at least, his administration had managed the state “in a way that any Republican would be proud.”

Before Cynthia: Pot Is Terrible. After Cynthia: We’re Just Going to Have to Live With It

Early last year, Mr. Cuomo, who had supported medical marijuana use, said he remained opposed to pot as a means of a good time, calling it a “gateway drug.” In January, he proposed that a commission be established to look at legalizing it. In April, immediately after Ms. Nixon made a case for legalization as a means of reducing racial inequity in the criminal justice system, Mr. Cuomo came forward saying that the situation with marijuana had changed dramatically because so many states near New York had legalized it or were about to and that essentially it was “here anyway.”

Before: Plastic Bags, Schmastic Bags. Now: We Need to Worry About Plastic Bags.

In February 2017, the governor signed a bill killing a law that would have levied a fee of five cents a piece on plastic bags in New York City. Then, late last month, he said he would like to ban all plastic bags in the state because of “the devastating toll on our streets, our water and our natural resources.”