Costa Constantinides surveyed the crowded second floor of Queens Democratic Party headquarters in Forest Hills and marveled at what he saw.

It was the 2010 kickoff meeting of the Queens County Young Democrats, and the after-work meeting had drawn more than 50 people—a head count several degrees of magnitude greater than what Constantinides was used to from just a few years before.

“In 2007, or 2006, we had four to five of us in this room,” Constantinides said. “Now, as the saying goes, ‘I think we need a bigger boat.’ Hopefully, the building won’t cave in.”

Youthfulness is not the first attribute that jumps to mind when thinking of the Queens Democratic Party. In fact, in the wake of an election season where the party-backed candidates lost nearly every competitive race they were in, many blamed the poor results on an increasingly old group of core volunteers who could not keep pace with the more youthful volunteers on other campaigns.

Now, the Queens Democratic Party realizes that they have to make a choice: get younger or risk irrelevance, according to Matthew Silverstein, the Queens Young Democrats’ former president and current New York State Young Democrats president.

Silverstein credits Rep. Joe Crowley, the Queens Democratic Party chair who took over when Tom Manton died in 2006, for a change in emphasis, despite the lack of evidence in the most recent elections.

“If not for Joe Crowley, you wouldn’t see any of this,” Silverstein said while standing beneath a poster for one of Manton’s old campaigns for the City Council. “He understood the county organization could not continue unless it built a farm system.”

The key moment in the still-ongoing resurgence came two years ago, Silverstein said, when Crowley agreed to sign off on allowing the Queens Young Democrats to become an official Democratic club.

Earlier in the decade, the club had been disbanded when a number of its members decided to run together as a slate against county-supported incumbents.

Silverstein had to promise Crowley that such an uprising would not happen again, and that he would shepherd the Young Democrats into the much older Democratic clubs across the county when they outgrew the organization.

This is a very different approach than was taken in Brooklyn around the same time in 2008, when a group of young activists asked party leader Vito Lopez if they could form a county committee to register voters for Barack Obama.

“He closed the door in our faces. He said, in so many words, that he wanted nothing to do with us,” said Lincoln Restler, vice president of the New Kings Democrats, which has since emerged from that incident as the most vocal anti-Lopez faction in Brooklyn politics.

Not that the younger, more progressive element in Queens has always toed the party line. This December, for instance, a number of the Queens Young Democrats held a rally in Astoria calling out State Sen. George Onorato for his vote against the same-sex marriage bill. One person who spoke at the rally, a 31-year-old civil rights lawyer named Jeremiah Frei-Pearson, subsequently met with Onorato and told the 27-year incumbent he would run a primary against him over the vote.

A month later, Onorato retired. Frei-Pearson said he hopes this kind of action would be the new paradigm in a more democratic Queens Democratic Party.

“I certainly hope that doing something like that is okay—I certainly hope the party is changing,” said Frei- Pearson.

But others outside the party structure wonder how much is really changing. They note, for instance, that many of the younger people attracted now to the Queens Democratic Party also happen to be employed by Queens politicians, and that they also happen to mostly be white.

Lynn Nunes, the 24-year-old who last year came within four votes of knocking off incumbent Council Member Tom White, said the party would only see a true revitalization when it starts to have a better representation of the ethnic communities in the increasingly diverse borough, selecting candidates based on their appeal to these communities, not on loyalty to the party.

“They need to make sure they’re reaching to different demographics and not limiting themselves to those groups that are already within the party,” Nunes said. “I was not waiting for people to come to me. I was going to them, and making sure they heard me.”

As the ranks of young Queens Democrats grow, they also face several upcoming tests to their influence. Silverstein wants to run for the Assembly, should embattled incumbent Ann-Margaret Carrozza choose not to run for re-election, while Steve Behar, another core member of the Queens Young Democrats, is threatening a primary.

And Constantinides announced at the recent meeting that he would be running in the race to replace Assembly Member Mike Gianaris, despite far from certain support for his candidacy from the county party.

Some believe that if district leaders do not make an effort to reward the new blood by supporting them in elections, the youth movement could slow. But Constantinides, for one, said he would continue to work on behalf of the party regardless of the party’s support for his candidacy.

“I don’t feel entitled to anything,” he said. “I never saw it as a quid pro quo.”