Ex-Progressive Fundraiser Exposes Left’s Takeover of Democrats
Former Democratic operative Evan Barker's new book reveals her disillusionment with the party after witnessing wealthy donors at a 2022 San Francisco fundraiser celebrate strategies that deliberately abandoned working-class voters.
A former Democratic operative who spent years fundraising for progressive insurgents including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed the moment she realized her party had abandoned working-class heartland voters in favour of coastal elites and identity politics.
Evan Barker, who campaigned for Barack Obama as a teenager and organized for Hillary Clinton in 2015, details her political transformation in a new book that lifts the lid on how Democratic strategists openly dismiss millions of former supporters who switched to Donald Trump, according to Evan Barker writing in New York Post.
The breaking point came at a March 2022 fundraiser at the San Francisco mansion of billionaire Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, where Barker was seven months pregnant and listening to wealthy white donors applaud strategies that explicitly wrote off entire regions of America.
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, then executive director of Steyer’s NextGen America youth organization, declared from the microphone that Democrats would not pursue voters who had defected to Trump. The future, she insisted, lay with young people of color.
Barker describes watching a primarily white and extremely wealthy crowd clap like seals at the proclamation, while waiters circulated with champagne and hors d’oeuvres against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Missouri Rejected, Texas Obsession Continues
When Steyer allocated 60 million dollars to the 2022 midterms under Ramirez’s direction, Barker attempted to pitch investment in Missouri, where low-propensity Trump voters might not turn out in a non-presidential election year. The state had elected a Democrat statewide as recently as 2018.
The response was blunt. Ramirez told Barker that NextGen would never go to Missouri, Barker recounts in her book “Nothing Left,” published by Threshold Editions.
Barker concludes that progressives abandoned states like Missouri because winning there would require cultural moderation. Instead, Democratic strategists became obsessed with flipping Texas, which has not elected a Democrat statewide since 1994, banking on demographic change rather than persuading former supporters to return.
From Union Family to Trump Voter
Born into a Kansas City union family, Barker built her reputation as what she describes as a ruthless fundraiser for Left Rising, a progressive consultancy. She helped progressive insurgents including Cori Bush and Jasmine Crockett win office by infiltrating the Democratic Party from within.
But her experience inside the progressive movement ultimately drove her to vote for Donald Trump in 2024, a decision she attributes partly to watching party elites dismiss voters like her grandmother and uncle as irretrievable deplorables.
NAFTA’s Long Shadow
Barker points to policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s alongside World Trade Organization agreements, as a key reason Democrats now struggle with working-class Midwestern voters. Although NAFTA was a bipartisan effort, Clinton became the figurehead of its consequences for industrial communities.
Democrats once won states like Ohio and Missouri easily, Barker notes. The party’s current strategy appears designed to build a permanent electoral majority through demographic change in states like Texas, eliminating any need to appeal to the working-class voters who once formed the Democratic base.
The evening at Steyer’s mansion also featured his wife performing an off-key a cappella version of a Brandi Carlile song for nearly ten minutes, with altered lyrics turning it into a political anthem about saving democracy or abortion, Barker recalls.
With information from New York Post
