A veteran Democratic campaign operative who volunteered to work at last month’s Democratic National Convention dejectedly says she’s walking away from the party and will vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Evan Barker, an ex-political fundraiser in a recent Newsweek op-ed expressed his increasing disenchantment with a party that he now feels is “totally out of touch” with the average American after having gone so far as helping to fundraise “tens of millions of dollars” for Democratic campaigns.
At first, Barker was “excited” to be at the DNC, and nominate now-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris,) but then her hope turned to a bitter disappointment.
“But once there, wandering amidst the glitz and glam, imbibing the gloss and schmaltz of it all, I couldn’t escape a sinking feeling. I felt submersed in a hollow chamber whose mottos were ‘Brat summer’ and ‘Joy’—totally out of touch with regular, every-day Americans and their pressing needs; instead, the most elite people in the world chanted in unison that “We’re not going back,” Barker wrote.
Barker realized that as she watched it unfold, how cross-pressured the party was from the one that she had once identified so closely with.
“I found myself feeling disenchanted, lost, sad, and alone. As someone who has given her life to Democratic politics, it was devastating. But if I’m being honest, it wasn’t totally surprising,” she continued.
Barker said she was raised in a family of blue-collar union Democrats near Kansas City, a “long ways away from the glitz, glamor, and ostentatious wealth I’d become accustomed to seeing in and around Democratic politics.”
“Fast forward to today, and many of those same family members are no longer Democrats. They feel the party has changed, left them behind,” she wrote. “At the DNC, I couldn’t help but think about my family. Every time the elites chanted ‘We’re not going back,’ what I heard was, ‘We’re not going back to the party your union family members used to vote for.'”
Barker came to Washington with a lifetime of experience as a fundraiser — experience that gave him insight into the workings of political campaigns and the power in money.
But while Barker concedes both sides of the aisle are probably guilty of the same sorts of things, she picks on Democrats, who she believes to be hypocrites.
“When I went to the DNC last month, I was truly hoping to be re-inspired, to feel the same love for the party I felt as a teenager when I pounded the pavement for Barack Obama. I can still recall the immense joy I felt after he won, running into the street with hundreds of other people to dance to ‘Thriller,’” she wrote. “But instead of giving me back that feeling, the DNC was where it finally hit me: It’s impossible to unsee what I’ve seen. I can only go forward.”
What shocked Barker the most, she said, was that the Democratic Party embraced the sort of foreign policy positions that were hallmarks of an era she associated with Bush.
Her broadside against the party’s emphasis on student loan forgiveness — an issue she said only benefits their core base of college-educated voters while leaving behind the 70% of Americans without a four-year degree — caused some controversy. “None of their proposals touch real reform,” she concluded.
