Even before she graduated from high school, Evan Barker was working in Democratic politics as a 2008 volunteer on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She turned 18 just in time for the November vote, and the night Obama won was "one of the happiest moments of my life."
Coming from extremely modest circumstances in Missouri and burdened with "a severe lung disease" that was not fully curable, it took Barker six years to earn her college degree. "My mom sold all six of her wedding rings to pay for one semester of tuition," but Evan still had $30,000 in outstanding loans when she graduated from the University of Kansas. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Barker was making $3,000 a month working for Hillary Clinton's campaign in western Kansas, and the morning after Donald Trump's surprise victory, "I lay in bed, sick to my stomach, racked with nausea and fear."
Soon after, Barker moved to New York City and began working in a northern New Jersey Democratic primary for "an empty, out-of-touch housewife who was trying to buy herself a seat in Congress." She soon quit, moved to Kansas City, and began working for a progressive white lawyer who was running for Congress against an establishment-backed Native American lesbian. In July 2018, Vermont socialist icon Bernie Sanders came to campaign for Barker's boss, and Evan was present when a young woman who had just won a congressional primary in New York City also arrived, meeting Sanders for the very first time: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC's "win changed what we knew to be possible" in progressive challenges to the Democratic establishment, but in person that day Ocasio-Cortez struck Barker as "a quiet introvert" and indeed "timid," notwithstanding how she was "an attractive young woman" with potential "star power." Only over time would Barker come to realize that AOC "could become the first woman president. … I would never underestimate her."
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