Evan Barker quit the party and voted for Trump. Now, she’s telling (a few of) her stories. Photo: Gabriela Hasbun Whenever Democratic political operatives gather to drink these days, they talk about three things: their chances in the midterms, who will be the nominee in 2028, and if they have read — or are in — “the book.” The book in question is Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, by Evan Barker, a onetime fundraiser who has written something between a tell-all and a cri de coeur about her time inside the Democratic Party. Barker, who worked mostly for candidates and groups associated with the insurgent left that sprung up in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, writes that Democrats’ priorities have been taken over by elite and highly pedigreed campaign staff who don’t realize how ridiculous they sound to the rest of America. But for many Democrats the book has been candy less because of its call for reshaping politics and more because, while peeling back the curtain on the inner workings of political campaigns, it names (some) names. A newly elected representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is described as a slightly overwhelmed, slightly paranoid political tactician who is reluctant to support a white progressive over a more moderate female candidate of color for fear of the backlash she will receive online. Senator Bernie Sanders is a gruff diva who flies private to a rally and insists that the labels be peeled off his water bottles and requires a bathroom to be a certain number of feet from the stage. Others are anonymized. There is the wealthy New York City donor who lives alone in an apartment overlooking Central Park but who scarcely leaves his home except for the only meal he eats each day: a bowl of soup at a nearby café. And there is a first-time congressional candidate in New Jersey, a suburban resistance mom running in 2018, whose husband worked for Lehman Brothers during the financial crash (at times dressing in a cape and top hat) and did not want to discuss healthcare in-depth. “You want to tell the truth, and you want to tell people what happened, but at the same time my intention was never to just burn people needlessly to be vindictive,” Barker told me from her home north of San Francisco. “At the same time, it’s like, yeah, I knew that some of the stories in there might hurt some people’s feelings, but sometimes people need to get their feelings hurt.” The book has put Barker on a familiar journey: I didn’t leave the party, the party left me. It’s been trod by many over the years and of late by everyone from former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to Robert Kennedy Jr. to, well, Donald Trump. In the year since Barker broke with the Democrats she has been on Fox News, written for the New York Post, and received a favorable review in The Wall Street Journal. Her book has also become a hit among professional Democrats who think that the party is in thrall to its corporate donors and woke preoccupations. “Everyone is talking about this book,” said Kara Eastman, a former Barker client who ran for Congress in 2018 only to find herself not supported by party leadership who feared that her left-leaning views were out of step with her purple district. “It definitely hit a nerve,” said Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks. “We have this person who is deep inside Democratic politics, who is voting for Trump, and is showing all of the internal dynamics and faults of the Democratic Party.” Nothing Left details Barker’s journey from working class in Missouri, where her parents split when she was young and have gone through 11 marriages between them. She was raised by her mother and grandmother, who lived together in a mobile-home park and survived on Social Security benefits. After high school, Barker attended Johnson County Community College and the University of Kansas, where she paid tuition with Pell Grants and student loans. Obamacare convinced Barker to take seriously a career working for Democrats. She says the bill saved her life by allowing her to still obtain health insurance after she realized she suffered from a rare genetic lung condition. At first, she worked on the party’s Establishment wing. Barker was a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. But, eventually, she drifted further into the party’s insurgent camp, finding work with groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the fundraising firm Left Rising. Barker’s book details the burnout, thrills, and occasional ridiculousness of campaign life. This includes one candidate who harangues Barker to be set up on dates (so long as they aren’t with white men, whom the candidate says physically repulse her), describes visiting a shaman, and details to Barker the time the candidate said she did mushrooms with Texas representative Greg Casar. (A spokesman from the representative’s office clarified that the incident happened when he was 21 years old.) But it also shows how Barker grows disillusioned with the party during what has been described as “peak woke,” when Democrats became too focused on identity and not on the kind of people like her family in Missouri. Barker recounts how she got into a disagreement with one of her clients, a Black woman running for Congress, who requested to pause certain donor calls that Barker had set up on the same day that the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came down. (“As a white woman, I should have known better than to do my job and give fundraising feedback to a client, a black woman, on the day of the Rittenhouse verdict,” she writes in mock reproach. “As a white woman, I should have kept a low profile that day.”) Another moment is when she is at a party at Tom Steyer’s house before the 2022 midterms, and she suggests to a colleague that they use some of their host’s millions to flip Missouri to the Democratic side. The suggestion is met with condescending dismissal because it would mean trying to win over working-class white voters instead of mobilizing voters of color in places like Texas. The tale ends with Barker at the DNC in Chicago, where she can’t quite jibe with the Brat-summer vibes of the Kamala Harris campaign. She walks out when Oprah Winfrey is speaking. A few days later, Barker records a TikTok in which she says she is quitting the party and voting for Trump. Barker followed up the video with op-eds for Newsweek and The Free Press. Soon publishers were asking for a book proposal and she was being interviewed by Lara Trump on the podcast of the president’s daughter-in-law. Lara even helped her get tickets to a Trump rally in Las Vegas, where she met the Republican presidential candidate for a photo op. In Nothing Left she describes meeting him in near-reverential tones: “The images of blood running down his face immediately came back to me. At that moment he was neither an enemy nor the person I’d hated for years; instead he was a human being who shook my hand and looked me in the eye. I didn’t expect this, but I felt genuine empathy for him.” It was, she writes, “as if I had just climbed out from inside a dream.” For those who worked alongside Barker, some of whom she names in the book, the switch is a bit mystifying. Not that she diagnoses the Democratic Party as too concerned about cultural issues and too elite (a concern that almost all Democratic Party operatives share) or even that she would betray the confidences of her onetime colleagues. They get that politics can feel a bit like a cool-kids club it might be alienating to be at the Democratic National Convention and not be able to get into all the parties and back rooms that you want to. But to then torch all that and go vote for Donald Trump and make content on his behalf, is, as Eastman put it to me, “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Some of Barker’s former colleagues in party politics see in her the kind of trajectory that has defined our age: someone on the periphery of inner sanctum, who feels as if their good ideas aren’t listened to, and who then rejects all that once she finds out much of the opposing camp is eager to welcome apostasies. Barker all but admits this in the book. She describes many fellow moms in her Bay Area friend group rejecting her after the viral TikTok. But when she goes on Lara Trump’s podcast, and tells her about the upheavals in her social life, she hears the president’s daughter-in-law declare: “I’ll be your friend!” “There are some people in life who, at the end of the day, they just want to be respected,” said one former colleague of Barker’s. “You go to these conventions and they can feel very status-y, just who has what ticket to what party, and I think if she had felt more included she would have probably had a fun time, but instead she’s not, so she leaves and is pissed off and then a million people watch your video and everyone on the other side is so nice. It’s just a very human thing.” Barker tells me there is a lot she doesn’t like about Trump — his rhetoric about immigrants, the war in Iran, the Medicaid cuts, letting the Obamacare subsidies expire, his hostility to unions. But Democrats make her and her family feel looked down upon and are too wrapped up in trans issues and abortion. She doesn’t know if she will work in politics again, spending her days instead doing book promotion, writing op-eds, and appearing on podcasts with other outcasts like Michael Tracey, the internet provocateur who explained to Barker soon after Gloria Steinem’s death how the feminist icon contributed to the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 90s, and Taylor Lorenz, a former mainstream tech journalist who has recently become known less for her reporting than her tweets. Barker doesn’t have a political home, she says, and doesn’t regret voting for Trump. But would the country be better off today if Trump had lost in 2024, and Kamala Harris was president right now? Barker pauses for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said. The New Book Democrats Hate — and Can’t Stop Talking About Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.