For Cuomo, the imminent Democratic takeover of the legislature brings both opportunity and challenge: He’ll have his best chance to prove his progressive mettle to doubters on the left, but he won’t have Republicans to blame if he can’t realize his ambitious vision. Success would add to his record as an effective, if unloved, Democratic governor and could even lay the seeds of a presidential campaign he says he’s not interested in waging. The question now is whether New York Democrats can seize on the moment to act in unison and avoid getting mired in the kind of parochial squabbles and power struggles that have stymied their leadership in the past.

“Obviously there’s a lot of pent-up frustration,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the incoming state Senate majority leader. “By the same token, there’s a lot of opportunity to really chart the course of a New York that is more reflective of the people that actually live here.”

Democrats last captured full control of state government a decade ago, but their narrow majority in the state Senate crumbled after dissidents, in a revolt against their party leader at the time, briefly defected to the GOP, leaving the chamber paralyzed for weeks and contributing to a Republican takeover the next year. More recently, breakaway Democrats formed an independent coalition with Republicans that helped keep the GOP in the majority for years. Several of those lawmakers lost primaries to progressive challengers in September, and Democrats won 40 of the chamber’s 63 seats in the general election two months later.

Stewart-Cousins will become the first African American woman to occupy one of the three powerful seats at the Albany negotiating table where most legislation in New York is hashed out, alongside Cuomo and the state-assembly speaker. “We’ll be making history in a lot of ways,” she told me in an interview.

New York will also be playing catch-up in a lot of ways.

Several of the top immediate priorities cited by Cuomo and senior legislative leaders are policies that either have already been enacted by other states or are intended as defensive maneuvers aimed at protecting New Yorkers from what the governor has called “the reckless unjust assault” against the state by Donald Trump’s administration.

On Monday, Cuomo committed his support for legalizing recreational marijuana after years of personal opposition. Yet 10 other states have already taken that step, and in an interview, his top aides acknowledged that the moves toward legalization by New York’s neighbors to the south and east—New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—helped force the governor’s hand.

Voting rights are another example. New York’s election laws are, by some measures, equally or more regressive than those in southern states. Last month’s general election was a mess, particularly in vote-rich New York City, where reports of machine failures and hours-long lines were widespread. There is no early voting, and people who want to change their registration to vote in a party primary must do so months in advance. Proposals to open up the system have died quiet deaths, thanks in large part to entrenched Democratic lawmakers who have little incentive to encourage higher turnout that could threaten their own incumbency.