*Charge* doesn’t. Charge *carriers* do. At eli5 level: these are electrons, yes, the same things that are in atoms. The electrons in a conductor can move around between atoms and if you put an electric field on them they’ll move that way. And these are physical particles and F=ma just like for ball bearings.
Slightly more complicatedly, they *aren’t* electrons: they are electron-rich and/or electron-poor areas of your solid. The electrons are manifold and legion and always zinging around all over the place: the electron-rich or electron-poor area moves a lot slower than an electron should, if you just consider its mass and the force on it. This can be thought of as a result of the net forces on it being much smaller, or you can abstract that all out because what the charge carrier *behaves* like is an electron (or an anti-electron) with a different inertial and gravitational mass.
And that’s actually way more important, at normal temperatures and energies, than all this stuff about Hamiltonians and wavefunctions and ‘*an electron*’ as a separate particle not really being a thing you can observe in a solid for Quantum Reasons.
Latest Answers