Conor Boylan from Naas who attended Naas CBS is the National Director of the Progressive Democrats of America. After leaving Ireland in 2006 Conor moved from high tech industry to follow his passion, politics. Now Living with his wife Nora in Chicago, Conor's organisation is helping Berni Sanders lead the charge in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

In an interview with In These Times in mid 2015 Conor laid out to Theo Anderson how his organisation brought a broadly unknown candidate Bernie Sanders to the fore as a serious front runner in the US Presidential Campaign 2016.

Conor joined the newly formed PDA organisation in 2009 and rose through the ranks to deputy director and is now the organisations National Director. The PDA was formed following John Kerry's presidential race failure. It was the PDA who encouraged Sanders to run for election following a petition campaign that they ran in 2014 which they presented to Sanders to persuade him to run.

Conor's organisation employed a viral strategy encouraging new members to join up and go to out like disciples and create local support groups. Saunders' rise says Conor was also down to his social media presence. Although generally unknown Sanders had a very strong social media presence. He had great interviews online and the social audience resonated with his stance and frank talking. We recently saw an example of this when Sanders took on the media in an impromptu interview on his campaign trail.

Before joining the PDA'sConor had experience on the Obama trail in Oregon and then worked as a field organizer in Ohio for the general election. Obama's social media campaign is well documented as a primary influencing factor in his success and it seems that Conor has taken some of those lessons onto the Sanders' trail as well.

We'll be watching the US Elections now with renewed local interest.

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