The next morning, at her apartment in Manhattan's Noho neighborhood, Nixon is still riding high. "I feel incredibly optimistic," she tells me, moments before an Audubon Society clock breaks into birdsong. In the first on-the-record sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the highest office in New York, the 51-year-old opens up to Glamour about her fears, her family, and why sometimes "naïveté is what we need" in politics.

GLAMOUR: I want to start with the location of your announcement, the Brownsville neighborhood in East Brooklyn. Why was this an important place to launch your run for governor of New York?

CYNTHIA NIXON: I think that one of the most important things that we have to do in this campaign—and one of the most important things we have to do as a state—is address racial and economic injustice. The entire state has been negatively impacted by Andrew Cuomo’s massive budget cuts to corporations and the wealthy, but I think that some areas, some neighborhoods, have been impacted a lot more than others. They feel the punch much harder, because they’re more vulnerable. So that’s why I wanted to start in Brownsville. I wanted to talk to people. And when I’m speaking to people in low-income communities of color, there are a number of issues that keep popping up: protecting undocumented people, the subways, and a whole host of things. But by far the number-one issue that keeps coming up is the lack of affordable housing and the tyranny of landlords. Our government, particularly in New York State, is so owned by the real estate lobby. Our rent laws have been shredded.

GLAMOUR: African-American women are a big part of voter turnout, especially during elections where we really need people to show up. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Ralph Richard Banks wrote, "So many Americans profess to be blind to race, which ensures only that it will remain salient." You clearly have that demographic very much in mind and are very outspoken on its behalf. What brought you to your current outlook?

CN: I think we only have to look at the election of Donald Trump to see that we are so clearly not living in a post-racial society. Maybe even less than we thought we were. I’ve been speaking out and doing fund raisers, for Planned Parenthood and NARAL, since I was 13. My mother was a breast cancer survivor, so I’ve been speaking out about the importance of early detection since about that time. Since I fell in love with my wife [in 2012 Nixon wed longtime partner Christine Marinoni, who recently stepped down from her role as special adviser for community partnerships in New York City's Department of Education], I’ve been doing LGBTQ stuff, and before that, I did a lot AIDS stuff in the eighties and nineties. But my main kind of activism that I’ve been doing over the past 17 years, since my oldest kid entered kindergarten, is fighting for funding for the public schools. Our schools are very, very segregated, certainly in this city, and this state. Once you get involved in fighting for the system as a whole, you meet a lot of different kinds of people and you get to hear about their experiences. I’m an ardent Democrat, but I feel that the party’s increasing reliance on corporate money and the demands of wealthy political donors means they are more and more removed from working class people. If the Democratic Party is going to stand for what it says it’s going to stand for, we have to, as you say, not just call on African-Americans when it’s election time and then forget about them the rest of the time. They’re our core base. They’re our most loyal voters. But also, when things like Donald Trump happen—and frankly, when things like Andrew Cuomo and his massive disinvestment in our state happen—they’re the hardest hit. And they're the first hit.

Victoria Stevens/AUGUST

GLAMOUR: Last night you talked about how in 24 hours you raised more from small donors than Cuomo has in seven years. But only 0.2% of his nearly $31 million "war chest" is actually small donors…