There is Twitter , and there is the real world. Occasionally, the two meet.

It happened over the last week, starting with a visit by a group of children and young climate activists to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Bay Area office last Friday. Their exchange — about whether the California senator would vote for or co-sponsor the Green New Deal resolution authored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — went viral. It led to a turbocharged debate about whether the video had been edited, but it also brought with it a tangible change in the halls of Congress.

In her now-infamous response, Feinstein said she was in the process of drafting her own, more moderate resolution on confronting climate change that she felt would have a better chance of passing in the GOP-run Senate. The group of young people, who ranged from 11 to 24, were from several different climate action groups, including the Sunrise Movement, Youth vs. Apocalypse, and Bay Area Earth Guardians. The viral Twitter clip has racked up more than 9 million views, and was the first time many people had heard of Feinstein’s alternative resolution, and when climate activists learned about it, they went into overdrive to stop it. Feinstein, facing pressure, this week elected to shelve it.

The senator’s reversal was one of several moments that has gone unnoticed in the fight for the Green New Deal, as young activists face skepticism from entrenched environmental groups and field regular criticism for their practice of protesting Democrats. What those critics miss is that it was a protest of a Democrat — then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that put the Green New Deal on the map, and now a second action against a Democrat has yielded a second success for the activists.

On Tuesday, the Sunrise Movement led a nationwide day of action, holding office visits, rallies, and office takeovers across 34 states to pressure lawmakers from both parties, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to support Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution. That their conversations with Democrats have borne more fruit should be instructive as they try to gin up more support the Green New Deal.

When hoping to stop a bold piece of legislation that has broad public support, one of the oldest moves on the Senate floor is to introduce a different version that is claimed to be just as good, but more reasonable. “I’ve been in the Senate for a quarter of a century, and I know what can pass, and I know what can’t pass,” Feinstein said last week.

It’s a hard play to combat, but with so much attention on Feinstein, activists had a slight advantage. Members of Climate Hawks Vote, a California-based political organization that focuses on climate, fired off nearly 2,000 letters to Feinstein within 48 hours of the exchange, while other activists, from organizations such as Sierra Club and Indivisible, put pressure on Feinstein, asking her not to introduce her own resolution.

“Senator Feinstein’s draft resolution didn’t respect the science,” RL Miller, co-founder of Climate Hawks Vote, said in a statement. “It ignored politically popular aspects of the Green New Deal such as a jobs program. It ignored the need to keep California’s oil in the ground — and it’s inexcusable that California’s senior senator writes a resolution ignoring Trump’s threat to drill for oil off the California coast.”

Instead of an alternative resolution that has less ambitious goals, Senate Democratic leaders, along with Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, crafted a simple resolution that simply says that climate change is real, driven by humans, and needs to be dealt with by Congress. The entire Democratic Caucus, including Feinstein, is expected to sign onto the resolution. It’s not an ambitious plan like the Green New Deal, but it is superior to the California senator’s proposal, which laid out specific goals that, even if met, would not match the scale of the crisis.

<More than 90 members of Congress, including 12 senators, are co-sponsoring Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s nonbinding resolution, which lays out a decade-long plan that would envision a dramatic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the creation of millions of “good, high-wage jobs,” and a relatively rapid goal of 100 percent clean electricity.

On Monday, the Sunrise Movement, in the form of roughly 250 Kentucky high schoolers, occupied McConnell’s Senate office, resulting in 35 arrests. Some protesters held up a banner that read “Mitch, Look Us in the Eyes,” while others lined the halls outside his office.