Obama Operative Turned Trump Voter Exposes the Anti-Working-Class Bigotry That Destroyed the Democrats

As right-wing populist lore goes, 9 million Obama supporters switched their party vote in 2016, giving President Trump the White House and revolutionizing conservative politics in the process.

Among them were Evan Barker’s family: white, working-class Missourians long victimized by Wall-Street-drafted trade treaties who had it with a party they felt abandoned them.

Barker, a teenage canvasser for Obama’s 2008 campaign who would later become a top fundraiser in the progressive movement, eventually followed suit, although only after years of watching the Democrats morph into the abolish ICE/police/“whiteness” party it eventually became circa 2020.

Her recently published book, “Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative,” recounts this story, viciously pillorying her former party along the way and showing the GOP that its future in the White House is solid should it never forget the neglected Americans in flyover country who put them there.

Close watchers of the Democratic Party will love reading about Barker’s political trajectory.

Coming from where she did, Barker started as a progressive, deeply hostile to the pro-Wall Street, Democratic establishment.

The first campaign for which she worked as chief fundraiser was a 2018 congressional primary in Kansas’s white, but urban, third district. AOC had just primaried 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley, kicking off the progressive mini-revolution within the party we know so well today.

Her candidate, Brent Welder, was a white straight male and union lawyer campaigning hard on an economically populist ticket: exactly what a region gutted by years of outsourcing wanted — and which propelled Trump to sweep the state, 57 to 36 percent, two years beforehand.

But as Barker’s story unfolds, the days for people like Welder in the Democratic Party, especially within its progressive wing, were numbered.

Although Barker did a superb job raising money for Welder, late in the campaign, the establishment Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee parachuted in Sharice Davids as a challenger: a Native American lesbian who came from nowhere, but with millions of dollars in establishment support.

Going against the DCCC’s wishes, Bernie Sanders and the then-upcoming AOC endorsed Welder, resulting in the DCCC (it’s suspected) spreading an online meme showing Sanders and Welder on one side with Davids on the other, reading “TWO WHITE MEN PLAN ATTACK ON WOC [woman of color] SHARICE.”

When Barker’s candidate narrowly lost to the handpicked but ideas-free Davids — she later won the district and still holds office today — she felt “heartbroken” and “robbed.”

“Sharice didn’t work hard for anything… she just showed up one day and tons of money followed her,” Barker said.

For Barker, this was her “first brutal beating from the Democratic machine, getting a true taste of what the establishment will do to fight against dissenting voices.”

Elsewhere, readers hear about the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee inserting a “fake Hispanic” onto the Texas Senate Democratic primary ballot (an apparently non-political white woman who happened to be surnamed “Garcia”) in order to hive off votes from a Hispanic progressive candidate for whom Barker was raising money and who was the lead challenger of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s favored candidate.

Again, Barker’s candidate lost.

The war between Establishment and Progressive Democrats was taking place within D.C. as well.

When AOC’s campaign manager, the multi-millionaire and early Stripe investor Saikat Chakrabarti, publicly attacked Sharice Davids (a “Democratic Party no-no,” we’re told) for voting for President Trump’s border funding bill (she is in a swing district after all), we’re told AOC was hauled into Nancy Pelosi’s office for a reprimanding.

In exchange for “good committee assignments,” we’re told, AOC fired Chakrabarti as well as fellow top staffer Corbin Trent — a moment for Barker in which AOC “sold her soul” to the establishment.

But the exchange also entailed Pelosi and fellow top brass being captured by AOC’s ascending progressive wing, wherein “AOC became a loyal lapdog for the establishment, while the establishment embraced the most divisive aspects of progressive rhetoric.” To Barker’s dismay, the “merger came at the expense of the populist vision expressed in Bernie’s 2016 campaign.”

Hereafter, economic populism would be dropped and the Democratic Party (both sides) would focus on cultural and social issues only. Cue the late 2010s “Great Awokening.”

Elite Privilege in the ‘Party of the Working Class’

Perhaps most interesting for conservatives is Barker’s conversion to Trumpism. In one scene, we find Barker, who partly grew up in a trailer park, at a social meeting at the super elite “Dems Club” in Washington, D.C.

Around her were girls dressed like “sorority girls… talking about their upcoming vacations to Hawaii and Europe.” They “looked disgusted” when Barker revealed she exercises at Planet Fitness, not $500-a-month “Barry’s.” Her key take: “This must be why [Democratic] politicos, if they are white, think the rest of the world is overwhelmingly privileged.”

Most Democratic operatives today are among genuinely privileged types — 65 percent of Americans earning $500,000 or more voted Democrat in the last general election, Barker tells us. As she relates, these types are typically from “power cities” like D.C. or New York. Most had gone to private school, then the Ivies; and often their parents led NGOs and other political-adjacent projects (if they weren’t lawyers or professors).

She found that many operatives’ parents were big donors as well — after she recounts one rich New Jersey female donor laughingly telling her “but you don’t look like someone from Kansas!” Barker tells us donor disdain for her background was common, as they expected their own children to have her job.

Seeing D.C. operatives up close, Barker asks at this point: “Is this really what the party of the working class is like?”

What makes elite, white Democrats so disconnected from flyover country is even more disturbing: racial guilt. Barker began to observe that her colleagues “viewed the world quite differently” compared to her.

As she writes: “The white campaign workers typically felt a lot of guilt for growing up ‘privileged’… they often liked to demonstrate to others an awareness of their privilege… it was obnoxious, even comical, to me… I genuinely didn’t have any such guilt.” Amen.

She writes further: These rich, white and genuinely privileged operatives “make fun of themselves as having no culture… they might feel they have no culture, but I don’t.” Again, amen.

With the perspective of talking politics with her poor, white relatives from a young age, Barker’s concerns about the party her family formerly supported became very deep: “I was seeing the destruction of the party of the working class in real time… the Democrats were now run by people who had zero cultural connection to the people the party had long represented.”

The Hollowing Out of the Democratic Party

A key insight for Republicans is the strain such racial neuroses is taking on the inner workings of the Democratic Party.

Even though plenty of non-white staffers came from backgrounds far more “privileged” than average whites — certainly compared to Barker’s — white operatives were expected to be sufficiently “deferential” to non-whites, black females especially.

This meant “never correcting minorities or pushing back on them in any way whatsoever,” even if it was part of the job. “To survive,” she writes, “I learned I had to be silent.”

Around 2020, the straight-talking Barker “failed” this new bit of party protocol — “acting too directly” to fellow campaign fundraiser, former congressional candidate, and daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, Nabilah Islam Parkes — and she was pushed to take a DEI training. She refused.

Around this same time, Barker was removed from an account after she had the temerity to challenge a black candidate’s fundraising ideas on the day (shock, horror) Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted — she should have known not to do this, a white colleague told her.

Clearly, the halls of the Democratic Party were beginning to resemble those of an insane asylum.

That white guilt so pervades today’s Democratic Party, especially the progressive wing, is because it’s so ingrained in the most important part of the party structure: the donor class.

Barker introduces us to people like Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a top donor she worked with and the founder of a “progressive donor collective” called “Way to Win.”

Hunt-Hendrix is the billionaire heiress of the Hunt oil family. Partly because her grandfather apparently “promoted racist policies,” for Barker, “it seemed like Leah felt immense guilt over her wealth and was using her inheritance to try to right her family’s wrongs.”

It was guilt-ridden donors like Hunt-Hendrix, she tells us, people so powerful they can dictate party policy, who drove the extreme anti-white racialization of the party away from economic populism in the years leading up to Barker’s departure.

It was rich, self-loathing whites like Hunt-Hendrix who were responsible for the party’s adoption of the so-called “Race Class Narrative” — a framework used to racialize any and every policy issue in discussion. According to “RCN” memos landing in operatives’ boxes across D.C. and elsewhere, says Barker, “if someone wanted to talk about housing costs or veterans’ issues, they had to talk about them in racial terms.”

Even Sanders had to fall in line, having to out, for instance: “Raising the minimum wage is not just about economic justice — it is about racial justice. Nearly half of Black and Latino workers in America…” blah, blah, blah.

Barker hints at what this all means for the future of the party. After recollecting how she had to look up job applicants online to make sure they weren’t white — or, at least, white males — she notes that “between the years of 2018 and 2024, 85 percent of [the top progressive advocacy groups] had non-white leaders… forty percent of the executive directors were black, 75 percent were women, and 15 percent of the leaders were white… only a single organization out of twenty was represented by a white male.”

Conclusion: “The Left” is now run “almost entirely, by brown and black millennial girl bosses.”

So what happens when an apparently hyper-competitive organization begins pushing against meritocracy-in-hiring so forcefully? As she writes: “When hiring decisions are based on immutable characteristics, it often sets the stage for significant challenges. It can lead to situations where leaders overlook critical data and evidence, eager to support initiatives that validate the reason they got the job. Leaders become ‘identity experts,’ not political operatives.”

In other words, don’t expect the left to engage in smart, culturally moderate politics anytime soon. The rot is simply too deep.

Besides the enlightening journey through the warping of the Democratic Party, Barker also offers plenty of red-meat anecdotes for conservatives. Among them:

The rumors that Kamala Harris is emotionally abusive to staff is common knowledge among Democratic operatives.

Bernie Sanders, who she met, is just as “gruff” and “curmudgeonly” in person. As one of his staffers told her: “He doesn’t care about people as individuals… he only cares about them as concepts.”

Barker once found a ton of crumbled-up American flag stickers in AOC’s Brooklyn office, giving her a “pang of anger.”

D.C. consultants advise candidates not to put their actual policies on their campaign website — just a donation link and biography.

It’s common for people deep in Democratic politics to be in their late 40s, yet still unmarried and without children.

Black candidates failing to meet their fundraising goals often blame it on “racism.”

At the 2024 DNC convention, she observed: a nonbinary Muslim prayer room; a woman with designer glasses wearing a t-shirt showing a giant uterus; and a giant inflatable IUD named “Freeda Womb.”

Compared to a Trump rally in Las Vegas she attended, there were more whites and far fewer working people in the crowd.

Democratic operatives are as delusional as conservatives think they are.

Barker: “It was common for us to call Republicans racist almost daily, convincing each other that the ‘alt-right’ was ‘absolutely’ terrifying, a force that wanted to literally murder us.”

AOC’s then-chief of staff, Corbin Trent, cried after visiting a border patrol facility with AOC, saying afterward at a party, “I don’t even believe in countries; we shouldn’t have any borders.”

Most operatives believed that the crime uptick which took place in cities where Soros-funded district attorneys were elected was a hoax created by Fox News.

Tell-all books from Democrats are rare. Any insider strong and honest enough to break from the left’s increasing cultishness not only risks ostracism from the circles they’re used to, but don’t get to enjoy the remunerative MSM contributor posts, and so forth, that Republicans who go rogue are able to enjoy.

By blowing the whistle on a party that went from pushing policies beneficial to everyone to one that now openly disdains whole sections of the country, Evan Barker is a true American heroine, perhaps a modern-day Joan of Arc, and most assuredly, an example for us all.

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