Missouri native describes socialism’s rise, why she left the Democrats in new book 

Evan Barker was a lifelong Democrat who campaigned for Barack Obama while she was still in high school.

The Kansas City-area native graduated from the University of Kansas in 2015 and began working in Democratic politics, eventually becoming a lead fundraiser for progressive candidates.

“We were kind of like the secret weapon of the far left,” she said, helping elect candidates including Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar and Jasmine Crockett.

Things took a surprising turn when she quit the party and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Barker’s new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, describes her political journey and argues that the Democratic Party is shifting because of the rise of socialist candidates.

Her “last straw” came in March 2022, when she “realized the weight of what progressives had become was unbearable.”

Giving up on the heartland

A political operative working for California billionaire Tom Steyer to elect left-wing candidates told Barker they would “never, ever go to Missouri,” despite the state having elected a Democrat to statewide office as recently as 2018.

Instead of trying to win back former Democratic voters in the heartland, the progressive campaign focused on turning Texas blue – a longshot, given its voting history – by increasing turnout among young voters of color, whom it believed would support left-wing candidates.

Feeling the party had abandoned many of its longtime supporters, including members of her own family, Barker soon turned away.

“My dad was born in St. Joseph, Missouri,” she writes, describing it as “a once booming industrial hub.” However, industry began leaving after the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, passed under President Bill Clinton. By 2004, the once reliably Democratic county voted for George W. Bush. Trump scored a sizable victory there in 2024.

Barker said the Democratic party is not trying to win back those voters because it does not want to be “culturally moderate.”

“It’s like committing a sin, going to the right on any issue, even if it means that they can keep their economic populism or they can keep pushing for universal health care. These other issues, they will not give up on things like defund the police, like open borders, the trans issue,” she told podcaster Bridget Phetasy.

Rise of Democratic Socialists

Barker cited Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as an example. The progressive is running in a Democratic primary against a more mainstream Democrat but recently “doubled down” on defunding the police. “And he’s running in a swing state,” said Barker, who formerly worked for El-Sayed. Although he was nice to her personally, she told Phetasy she wouldn’t vote for him because of his far-left policies.

Barker called the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America “an even worse alternative” than restoring the party’s establishment base, which took a beating following Kamala Harris’ defeat in 2024.

“People that work in the progressive DSA movement, they are so cocky and so confident, so arrogant right now about all of their wins. They think that this is the answer to the party, to their failures … but it’s an even worse alternative.”

When Barker worked for Brent Welder, a progressive Democrat who lost the 2018 congressional primary to Sharice Davids, she was in the room when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met for the first time. Welder had organized an event to receive their endorsements.

“She kind of seemed boring, like just kind of a basic chick,” Barker said of Ocasio-Cortez, who had won her New York primary but had not yet been elected to Congress. “And Bernie was a little standoffish and curmudgeonly and didn’t really want to talk to anybody – and needed all of his water bottles to have the labels removed and demanded that we build a private bathroom for him within a certain number of feet from the stage, which cost the campaign $3,000.

“They didn’t really talk,” Barker added. “It was like she was sort of just overlooked, and he was not really engaging with her actually is what I saw behind the scenes. It was a little awkward because he didn’t stick his neck out for her in the primary.”

Now Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are among the socialist movement’s most vocal boosters and often share platforms.

Barker said far-left operatives know their best chance to influence the Democratic Party’s priorities is to win races in the midterm elections, “which is why you see them going so freaking hard.”

“Part of the reason that we’re seeing this wave right now is because they do it strategically, as a way to terrify the establishment and to make it so that they adopt their policies out of fear of being primaried, and then that goes into the presidential election in 2028,” she told Phetasy. “The same thing happened in 2020, where the progressives sort of dominated for a few years after the midterm cycle of 2018, and then in 2020, you saw all these mainstream Democrats trying to out-left each other and running on Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”

Barker said that wave likely influenced Kamala Harris to voice support for providing sex-change surgeries for prisoners, something Donald Trump later highlighted in a successful campaign advertisement.

The DSA’s strategy “is going really well,” Barker said, but she argued it is also helping Republicans. One example is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who “puts out videos like he’s the president of the far left – because he is!”

“I’ve heard just like the past week, my family back home is so upset about this DSA wave,” Barker said. “Like they are absolutely freaking out. And maybe they don’t like every single thing Donald Trump has done over the last few years (but) they are not down with Mamdani. And they’re fired up and ready to go to the polls in November to try to push through people that reject that agenda.

“And so I think it will actually favor the Republicans. And then when you look at the Senate, I think that it’s most likely that the Republicans will maintain control… I don’t see the Democrats winning Maine at this point,” after Graham Platner dropped out, prompting Democrats to appoint a replacement.

Barker now lives in Northern California and describes herself as a political independent. She said most Americans are focused on economic issues, not progressive priorities such as a litmus test for ending support for Israel.

She also expressed concern about the rise of Islam and what she called “Islamo-communism,” which she described as a combination of Islam and socialism.

“I think those values are just so antithetical to what, especially Americans in the heartland of this country believe, and it goes back to this fundamental misunderstanding that Democrats have that they don’t need to court those people anymore because young minorities are going to carry them – even though we saw a lot of them splinter off and vote for the Republicans in 2024, because it turns out they have more in common with working class white people in the middle of the country than they do rich Nepo baby trust funders in Brooklyn, New York,” she told Phetasy.

Too much pressure from the left will produce pushback, as it did with her.

“Americans are very nice and they’re very tolerant actually, but as we’ve seen with [gay] pride, if you keep putting it in their faces and kind of force them to celebrate something that they’ve been tolerating, maybe even begrudgingly, they’re going to react to that and say, ‘f— you.’

“Do not underestimate how much the Christian nation of America is. It does have a kind of primal reaction to stuff like that.”

(Image credit: Evan Barker/x/evanwch)