Evan Barker raised money for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Jasmine Crockett. She was seven months pregnant, standing in Tom Steyer's San Francisco mansion, watching a billionaire's wife butcher a Brandi Carlile song off-key while donors clinked champagne glasses. That was the moment she decided the Democratic Party was finished. In 2024, she voted for Donald Trump.
The Party Was Literally at a Billionaire's Mansion
Let's set the scene, because the scene is doing a lot of work here. According to an exclusive excerpt published by the New York Post from Barker's new book, "Nothing Left," the event was a fundraiser at Tom Steyer's home in one of the most elite neighborhoods in San Francisco. Steyer, for the uninitiated, is a billionaire Democratic mega-donor who also ran for president in 2020. Waiters with silver trays. Views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Wine glasses clinking among a crowd Barker describes as "primarily white and extremely rich."
And then, from the microphone, NextGen America executive director Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez delivered what Barker calls her last straw: "We won't be getting those voters; they're not coming back -- the ones who left and switched to Donald Trump -- the future is young people of color!" The crowd, per Barker, applauded "like drunken seals." Yes, that is an exact quote. She put that in her published book.
Sixty Million Dollars, and Missouri Can Go to Hell
Here's where it stops being funny and starts being genuinely instructive. Barker writes that Ramirez told her Steyer was allocating $60 million to the 2022 midterms, with Ramirez having full discretion over how to spend it. Sixty million dollars. Barker, who grew up in a Kansas City union family and knew the terrain, tried to pitch investing some of that in Missouri. She argued, reasonably, that low-propensity MAGA voters would be less likely to show up in a midterm without Trump on the ballot. The races were winnable.
The response, per the New York Post's excerpt, was immediate and decisive. "Evan, I can promise you, we will never, ever go to Missouri," Ramirez said, with what Barker describes as a big smirk. Missouri, for context, last elected a Democrat statewide in 2018. Texas hasn't elected one since 1994. But flipping Texas through demographic change was the obsession. Missouri, full of the exact working-class voters who used to be the Democratic base, wasn't worth a phone call.
The Theory of the Case, and Why It Keeps Losing
Barker doesn't just report the anecdote and move on. She explains the underlying logic, and it's important to understand it because Democrats keep running this play. The theory, as she reconstructs it, was that Texas would eventually flip because of changing demographics -- specifically young voters of color who were assumed to be natural progressives -- and that this flip would redraw the electoral map permanently. No cultural moderation required. No outreach to the people who left. No Missouri.
The New York Post excerpt includes Barker's analysis of how trade policy created this problem in the first place. NAFTA and WTO agreements, signed into law by Bill Clinton in the 1990s, concentrated job losses disproportionately in the Midwest and Rust Belt. The working-class voters who built the Democratic coalition watched their factories close and concluded, over the following two decades, that the party that signed those deals didn't particularly care whether they lived or died. They weren't wrong to notice that.
Her Uncle Said It Better Than Any Consultant Could
Barker includes one exchange in the excerpt that should be printed out and taped to the wall of every Democratic Party office in America. She asked her uncle, a bricklayer, union member for over forty years, Navy veteran, owner of over eighty guns, and former lifelong Democrat, whether he thought the party looked down on people like him. He has voted for Trump since 2016.
He laughed. "Do Democrats look down on me? They don't even look at me at all." That's it. That's the whole thing. A guy who spent his life in a union, which is the literal institutional backbone of the labor movement that Democrats claim to represent, and the party hasn't looked his direction in a decade. You don't lose that voter by being too moderate or too progressive. You lose him by making him invisible while singing off-key at a San Francisco mansion fundraiser.
Who Is Evan Barker, and Does Her Journey Matter?
The New York Post reports that Barker was born into a Kansas City union family, campaigned for Barack Obama in high school, and organized for Hillary Clinton in 2015. She worked at a consultancy called Left Rising and by her own description built a career as a "ruthless fundraiser" helping progressive insurgents win primaries. AOC, Cori Bush, Jasmine Crockett, people who are now household names on the left, were among her clients.
Her book, "Nothing Left," published today by Threshold Editions, is the account of how she lost faith in all of it. Her vote for Trump in 2024 will be the detail that gets the most attention, and it will also be used by bad-faith actors on the right to "prove" things it doesn't actually prove. One fundraiser's disillusionment is not a mandate. But the specific observations she makes about where Democratic money goes, who gets ignored, and what the party actually believes about its own voters -- that part is worth sitting with regardless of where she landed.
The Dingo Take
Look, the right will use this book as a cudgel. "Even their own people voted for Trump" will be the Fox News chyron, and Barker will do a hundred interviews where she's treated as proof that the Democratic Party is irredeemably radical. That's the wrong lesson and everyone promoting it knows it.
The actual lesson is sitting in one specific detail: $60 million controlled by one person, at a party in a billionaire's mansion, and the deliberate strategic decision to write off an entire region of the country because winning there would require talking to people who make the donor class uncomfortable. That's not a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem. That's a money-in-politics problem. That's what happens when the people writing the checks get to set the map.
Barker ended up voting for a man who has spent his entire political career betraying the exact union families she's writing about. That's the tragic part of this story, and she either knows it or she doesn't. But the thing she saw at Tom Steyer's house was real. The smirk was real. The champagne was real. And the union bricklayer who said the party doesn't even look at him -- he's real too, and he's still waiting for someone to prove him wrong.
