How to Kill a Political Party: An Insider’s Guide

As right-wing populist lore would have it, 9 million Obama-supporters switched sides in the 2016 election, giving President Trump the White House and revolutionizing conservative politics in the process. Among them were members of Evan Barker’s family: white, working-class Missourians long victimized by trade treaties and agreements drafted with the interests of Wall Street in mind. They were voters who had had it with a party they felt abandoned them.

Barker, who had been a teenage canvasser for Obama’s 2008 campaign and who would later become a top fundraiser in the progressive movement, eventually followed the path forged by other members of her family, 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 . . . but only if it never forgets the neglected Americans in fly-over country who put them there.

Close watchers of the Democratic Party will love reading about Barker’s political trajectory. She began her political awakening as a progressive, deeply hostile to the pro-Wall Street, Democratic establishment. The first campaign for which she served as chief fundraiser was a 2018 congressional primary in a white, but urban, district in Kansas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just primaried the 10-term Brooklyn congressman, Joe Crowley, kicking off a mini progressive revolution within the party. Barker’s candidate, Brent Welder, was a straight, white 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 prior). But as Barker’s story unfolds, the reader sees why the days for people like Welder in the Democratic Party, especially given the trajectory of its progressive wing, were numbered.