Heather Mizeur is the future of the Democratic Party

Her platform ... contains nearly every next-wave energizing idea in liberal politics—the sort of stuff that, she thinks, by 2016 or 2020 will be a necessary on Democratic presidential candidates’ primary platforms.

The central item is a plan to legalize and tax marijuana and use the receipts to fund a pricey universal pre-kindergarten program. She wants to increase the minimum wage up to a living wage—$16.70/hour and indexed to inflation—gradually by 2022. She’s outspoken on environmental issues and has fought the fracking industry in natural-gas rich Western Maryland. In the criminal justice system, Mizeur wants to eliminate mandatory minimum drug sentences and replace the cash bail system with a risk-assessment program. She would reinstate the state’s lapsed “millionaire’s tax” on upper-income earners and give a modest income tax cut to everyone else; similarly, she’d fund tax rebates for small businesses with the revenue derived from closing the “combined reporting” loophole that allows certain large companies to avoid paying the state’s corporate income tax. On health care, her immediate goals are to put in place a series of measures to make Medicaid enrollment smoother. By 2017, though, she intends to make use of an innovation waiver for which states will be eligible to “look at ways to go above and beyond what was ever laid out as a vision for health reform under the Affordable Care Act”—meaning, perhaps, eliminating the insurance “middleman” altogether.