Civics: The Democrats’ Identity Trap
Evan Barker’s tell-all reveals a party in turmoil.
On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.
Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.
Nearly two years later, the full story behind Barker’s split from the Democratic Party is told in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. While she isn’t the first person to write about Kansas, the working class, or the Democrats’ fall, Barker is the first to do it with a true insider’s perspective. The solution she offers reads less like a fix than a final warning to a party that looks to be spiraling out of control.
A 20-Year Diagnosis
In 2004, before Barker had entered politics, Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas?, arguing that Democrats had drifted toward economically conservative policy while wading ever deeper into culture-war territory. His prescription was illustrated by example: the state’s most successful Democrat, Governor Kathleen Sebelius, won by doing the opposite. She focused on issues people like Barker’s family cared about—health care and school funding—while steering clear of hot-button social fights. Diagnosis and prescription were delivered together. That was before social media, algorithms, and Super PACs came along to flatten any bottom-up narrative a candidate might otherwise build.
