Evan Barker believed she was a lifelong Democrat. Born into a Kansas City union family, she campaigned for Barack Obama while still in high school and was a community organizer for Hillary Clinton in 2015. Working for the consultancy Left Rising, she writes, “I built my name as a ruthless fundraiser … I was a live player who helped progressive insurgents” — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush and Jasmine Crockett — “infiltrate from within.” But her new book, “Nothing Left” (Threshold Editions), out today, gives a look at how Barker lost faith in her party — and, in 2024, voted for Donald Trump. In this exclusive excerpt, she reveals one of the moments that showed her how Democrats shamelessly left heartland voters in the dust.
On a cold evening in late March of 2022, I realized the weight of what progressives had become was unbearable. This was my last straw.
“We won’t be getting those voters; they’re not coming back — the ones who left and switched to Donald Trump — the future is young people of color!” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez roared into the microphone.
That’s a great way to get Donald Trump re-elected, I thought to myself, feeling annoyed as I looked around at a primarily white and extremely rich crowd, who were clapping at her every word like drunken seals.
I was standing in front of Tom Steyer’s mansion in one of the most elite and exclusive neighborhoods of San Francisco. Tom is a billionaire and Democratic mega-donor. He also ran for president in 2020.
I was seven months pregnant, nearing the end of my pregnancy.
Cristina, whom I had worked for on her US Senate race in Texas, was now the executive director of Tom Steyer’s organization NextGen America, the most important liberal youth organization in the country. NextGen was the Left’s rival to Turning Point USA. They hoped to turn out millions of young people to vote, and they had deep pockets to make that happen.
The view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Tom’s front yard was breathtaking. Waiters holding silver trays of delicious hors d’oeuvres moved delicately around the small gathering, whose champagne and wine glasses clinked together.
At one point, Steyer’s wife sang a cappella at the microphone for almost ten minutes. She was off-key and altered the lyrics of the Brandi Carlile song called “The Mother.” She changed the words to her own political anthem. (I can’t remember what the song was about, probably saving Democracy or abortion.)
We were nearing the midterms, and I had been invited to Tom’s party by Cristina. The event was meant to introduce donors to her and her vision for the 2022 midterms. I was still working at Left Rising as a director. Cristina and I had become friends. She stayed at my house when she came to town; she called me at least once a week. She even came to my wedding reception and gave a toast.
I’d heard Cristina make statements about flipping Texas and young people of color as an ignored voter bloc of the party but I’d honestly never heard her so brazenly say there was no point in trying to win back people like my grandma or uncle.
When she told me Tom was going to allocate $60 million to the midterms and give her free rein over how to spend the money, I tried to pitch her on investing in Missouri. At the midterms, low-propensity MAGA voters would be less likely to show up because Trump wasn’t on the ballot. The races were winnable.
“Evan, I can promise you, we will never, ever go to Missouri,” she said, a big smirk across her face. I knew exactly what she meant; I didn’t even have to ask. Still, it made little sense to me.
Missouri was filled with tons of people who used to loyally vote for Democrats. Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. Missouri last elected a Democrat statewide in 2018. But flipping Texas was an outright obsession of progressives.
I suspect that they gave up on places like Missouri because they would need to culturally moderate to win there. Their belief was that Texas would eventually flip because of changing demographics — specifically young people of color, who they believed were natural progressives. Their ultimate dream was that they’d flip Texas, changing the electoral map in favor of Democrats forever, without ever having to appeal to the “deplorables” like my family members, the Democrats who left and switched to Trump.
It’s funny because Democrats used to win places like Ohio and Missouri easily.
Part of the reason Democrats now struggle to win workingclass people in the Midwest is specifically due to policies like NAFTA. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements into law. Although this was a bipartisan effort, Clinton ultimately signed his name on the dotted line and has become the figurehead of its consequences. If George H. W. Bush had won and signed NAFTA into law instead, he wouldn’t have betrayed his base the way Clinton did.
At that time, the people who supported Republicans were not majority working-class, they were majority college educated and believers in big business and free trade. In the aftermath of these trade deals, many concluded that jobs were already being moved overseas, and the job losses were part of a natural trend of de-growth and automation. But they always ignore that the Midwest and the Rust Belt experienced a significantly higher concentration of job losses than other parts of the country due to changes in trade policy.
I once asked one of my uncles if he thought the Democratic Party looked down on people like him. He is a bricklayer, construction worker, member of a union for over forty years, Navy veteran, a guy who owns over eighty guns, and a lifelong Democrat. But since 2016 he has voted for Donald Trump.
He laughed. “Do Democrats look down on me? They don’t even look at me at all!”
Another uncle of mine, the last and sole member of my family who still votes for Democrats, told me around 70% of his local union voted for Trump. When he would ask his members why they liked Trump, they’d say things like:
“Trump just gets me, man.”
“But Trump’s not going to help our union,” he’d say.
“Neither do Democrats,” they’d answer him.
I wonder if Cristina, and others like her, realized they were alienating these men, too, or if they even cared.
My dad was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, a midsized town about an hour north of Kansas City, the home of Jesse James, and once a booming industrial hub. St. Joe is now filled with abandoned factories and boarded-up buildings. People in my family knew workers who lost their jobs when Lee Jeans closed its factory there in 1996. NAFTA hit towns like St. Joe hard. Especially men without college degrees who once held high-paying jobs in manufacturing and working in factories.
In the year 2000, the consequences of NAFTA became visibly noticed on the national electoral map. That year, Al Gore won the county where St. Joseph is located by just two points. By 2004, George W. Bush won the county by a margin of six points. In 2016, Donald Trump won it by twenty-seven. The most dramatic shift yet. This reflects a pattern of worsening conditions, job loss, and economic hardship. But it also shows that Donald Trump ran on a platform of bringing these jobs back through tariffs and ending free trade, when Democrats did not.
But it wasn’t just economic policy that pushed these voters away. It has also been cultural. Identity politics, boys in girls’ sports, and immigration have been huge factors in the white working class’s departure from Democrats. It is obvious, from the policies Democrats speak about to the culture within the party, that the Democratic Party does not care about these types of voters, even more so if they are white.
Texas was a test of demographic change. If Democrats could win Texas, it would signal that Democrats could change the politics of any state where they could mobilize enough Latinos. They didn’t need the white working class anymore because they had Latino working-class people now. (Or so they thought.)
Missouri was the past. Texas was the future. Ironically, not only do Democrats need to economically deliver, but they need to be culturally moderate in order to win both of these states. They need to be anti-progressive populists to win. Somehow they don’t see the winning strategy is the same in both places, despite being racially different.
Excerpted from Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Copyright © 2026 by Evan Barker. Reprinted by permission of Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
