“On Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”
These are the words of Evan Barker, writing for The Free Press on November 9, 2024. A lifelong Democratic operative from a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d spent her career getting progressives elected. Then, as she put it, the Democratic Party “turned its back on me and my family.” At the time, Evan’s story captured a trend playing out across the country: The working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, was drifting away from the party.
Now, with the progressive wing ascendant and the midterms approaching, that shift has only become more consequential. But how exactly did it happen? And what do Democrats need to do to win back the voters they lost? Evan is better positioned than most to answer those questions. That’s exactly what she does in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which hits shelves Tuesday. In today’s exclusive excerpt, she pulls back the curtain on the transformation of the modern Democratic Party, from a rare vantage point: inside the belly of the beast. —The Editors
The night Barack Obama won his first presidential race was one of the happiest moments of my life.
I was a campaign intern. I hadn’t finished high school, but I canvassed outside concerts, inside laundromats, in gas stations, and on college campuses, working more than 40 hours a week. I’d stay at the office past 8 p.m. on school nights, leading phone banks and teaching volunteers three times my age how to talk to voters. It felt like there was no mission more critical than electing Obama. I was changing the world.
Like most of my generation, I was angry at the George W. Bush administration. I looked at Obama as a new hope, someone who would end the senseless violence in the Middle East, fix the economy, and bring us out of recession.
But one issue made me willing to crawl over glass for Obama: healthcare. I spent my childhood in and out of hospitals with a severe respiratory condition. For years, doctors told my parents I had bad asthma that I would someday outgrow. At 15, they finally made the correct diagnosis. I had a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). My disease wasn’t curable, and it was poorly understood. Going in and out of the hospital would be the constant rhythm of my life.
