But Conner changed course in this year’s campaign for governor, after concluding that Democrats could win only with more daring messages on issues such as public health and immigration.
A 27-year-old social worker, Conner voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries, spurning the more liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., whom many of her peers backed.
But Conner changed course in this year’s campaign for governor, after concluding that Democrats could win only with more daring messages on issues such as public health and immigration.
And so on a recent Wednesday, she enlisted two other young women to volunteer for Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old advocate of single-payer health care running an uphill race in Michigan to become the country’s first Muslim governor.
“They need to wake up and pay attention to what people actually want,” Conner said of Democratic leaders. “There are so many progressive policies that have widespread support that mainstream Democrats are not picking up on, or putting that stuff down and saying, ‘That wouldn’t really work.'”
Voters like Conner may not represent a controlling faction in the Democratic Party, at least not yet. But they are increasingly rattling primary elections around the country, and they promise to grow as a disruptive force in national elections as younger voters reject the traditional boundary lines of Democratic politics.
Energized to take on President Donald Trump, these voters are also seeking to remake their own party as a ferocious — and ferociously liberal — opposition force. And many appear as focused on forcing progressive policies into the midterm debate as they are on defeating Republicans.
The impact of these activists in the 2018 election has been limited but revealing: Only about a sixth of Democratic congressional nominees so far have a formal affiliation with one of several important insurgent groups.
But the voters who make up the ascending coalition on the left have had an outsize effect on the national political conversation, driving the Democrats’ internal policy debates and putting pressure on party leaders unseen in previous campaigns.
Mark Brewer, a former longtime chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said “progressive energy” was rippling across the state. But Brewer, who backs Gretchen Whitmer, a former state Senate leader and the Democratic front-runner for governor, said Michigan Democrats were an ideologically diverse bunch and the party could not expect to win simply by running far to the left.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.