In September 2004, all four co-stars of HBO’s Sex and the City gathered in the ballroom of LA’s Shrine Auditorium for the 56th Emmy awards. It was a strangely edgy moment, coming as the sitcom was drawing to its six-year close and with three of the four – Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis – all competing for the same accolade of best supporting actress in a comedy series.

When the announcement came and the words “Cynthia Nixon” rang through the vast hall, the actor looked genuinely stunned – “flabbergasted”, as she later admitted. Nixon, who played the hard-headed Miranda Hobbes in the show, stumbled on stage to receive her Emmy from the host of a new reality TV series that had just aired called The Apprentice, a bear of a man with an outsized grin on his face under a mop of meticulously combed-over orange hair. His name: Donald Trump.

Fast forward almost 14 years, and Nixon and Trump can eerily be mentioned in the same breath once again. This week, Nixon, 51, following in Trump’s footsteps, became the second celebrity New Yorker in recent memory to run for high public office – in her case not the US presidency, but the governorship of New York state.

Her timing is certainly striking. Voters in one of the most progressive states in the nation are hardly queuing around the block to elect yet another TV star from the Big Apple a year into what most New Yorkers consider to be the disastrous Trump experiment (and they didn’t vote for him in 2016 – Trump lost New York to Hillary Clinton by a whopping 23 points).

Monday’s declaration that Nixon plans to challenge the sitting New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the state’s Democratic primary brought a torrent of opprobrium, some of it from unexpected quarters. Of the twin New York tabloids, it was the left-leaning Daily News and not the right-wing Post that snarkily recalled her sex scenes in Sex and the City, likening her to Cicciolina, the Italian porn star turned member of parliament.

Christine Quinn, the former speaker of the New York city council, called Nixon an “unqualified lesbian” – a peculiar brickbat coming from a woman who is herself lesbian. (Quinn later apologized, saying her comment “came out wrong”.)

You don’t have to use sexually charged slurs, however, to find Nixon’s bid for the governorship of a state with a $168bn budget a stretch, considering she has never held elected office or led a major enterprise. Ester Fuchs, a political scientist at Columbia university who advised Michael Bloomberg when he was New York mayor, pointed out that while Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were both actors who became governors of California, that state’s relationship with fame is entirely different to its east coast cousin.

“New Yorkers aren’t Californians – we don’t look at celebrity as a qualification for political office. People in this city are very jaded – they are not starstruck in the same way,” Fuchs said.

Nixon’s conundrum is that while she must make the most of her extensive name recognition among the state’s 5.8 million registered Democrats – in electoral terms, what else has she got? – she must do it in a way that avoids any whiff of the glamorous lifestyle and Manhattan chic that Sex and the City moulded into televisual gold. It is a reasonable wager that Hermès Birkin handbags and Manolo Blahnik heels will not be featuring on the Nixon campaign trail.

Her new campaign website and launch video go light on SATC but heavy on Nixon’s modest background and pristine liberal credentials. She was raised a native New Yorker on the Upper West Side by her single mother, with whom she remains close.

Her acting career kicked off at the age of 12 when she appeared in an ABC television special, and by 14 she made her debut on Broadway. At 18 she had the distinction of appearing in two Broadway shows simultaneously – a wheeze cooked up by director Mike Nichols. Nixon’s campaign literature boils this impressive early thespian history down into a Spartan story of hardship, saying that she did all that child acting “to earn money to pay for her college education”.

No matter how hard she tries, though, there is no getting round the fact that for most New Yorkers Cynthia Nixon remains inextricably connected to the spiky, sardonic Harvard-trained lawyer she played in the HBO show. Though it would be wholly unfair to judge her by the foibles of that character, so intense was the impact of Sex and the City on a generation of viewers, particularly women, that some of Miranda’s aura is bound to stick.

At least Miranda was the most politicized of the four, with a caustic take on men (“All I have to do to meet the ideal man is give birth to him”) and a sharp tongue when it came to fairness and justice. For Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, whose 20th anniversary retrospective on the show, Sex and the City and Us, will be published in June, Miranda was “the smart, skeptical, feminist one. While we have to separate the person from the character, this can only help her cause,” she said. “I would advise Cuomo not to underestimate the emotional pull of Miranda Hobbes.”

Since the conclusion of the show in 2004, Nixon has worked probably more assiduously than any of her co-stars to detach herself from the show, to “de-Mirandafy” herself, as the New Yorker put it. Though she appeared in the two Sex and the City movies, she has put most of her effort into rebuilding her career as a stage actor, bagging two Tony awards for Rabbit Hole in 2006 and last year’s The Little Foxes. She also earned a Grammy for voicing the audiobook of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

In her personal life, too, plenty has changed since Sex and the City. She split with the father of her two daughters and went on to marry Christine Marinoni, a public education advocate with whom she has had a son. All of her three children have been put through public schools, and Nixon herself has campaigned passionately over many years as a champion of state education.

Education ­will be one of the main themes of her campaign, as will gay rights. She launched her gubernatorial bid on Wednesday night at the legendary West Village gay bar the Stonewall Inn.

Among her other policy priorities will be fixing the crumbling New York subway, which she rides frequently and which falls under the governor’s purview, fighting to end mass incarceration, and doing more to close the state’s vast equality gap that places the super-rich like Trump cheek by jowl with the struggling poor. Nixon stresses that New York is the single most unequal state in the union, with the top 1% earning 45 times the combined income of the other 99%.

Will this be enough? Progressive Democrats on the left of the party are already fired up, hailing Nixon as the long-awaited antidote to the establishment politics of the much-reviled incumbent.

But Cuomo is a wily and formidable opponent who has also worked hard at building his liberal credentials, including signing the gay marriage law in 2011 under which Nixon and Marinoni were married. With a daunting lead in the polls of 66-19 over Nixon, he has made sure to leave relatively little space to his left in which she can mobilize. And she must also beware that policies that may delight the progressive neighborhoods of New York City could be anathema to the more conservative towns and countryside in the rest of the state.

“Cynthia Nixon’s got tremendous name recognition, which is the first thing you need,” said Fuchs, who describes herself as a fan of Sex and the City. “But that doesn’t translate into support – and she may have confused that.”