Ex-Dem operative details ‘new donor establishment’ behind Mamdani-era progressives: ‘Not from the grassroots’

Evan Barker, a former Democratic operative turned voter for President Donald Trump, detailed alleged dark money influence that she says has driven the party further left.

Barker, who raised money for Democratic candidates throughout her career, from Barack Obama to progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., before deciding to vote for Trump in 2024, explained in an interview with Fox News Digital that the party’s major shift influenced her decision to defect.

“I first got activated in Democratic politics when Barack Obama was running in 2008. And if you look at him then and you compare him to the modern movement of the party today, it is just night and day. They have gone left on so many critical issues, like immigration and identity politics and defund the police and just all of these things that I did not sign up for,” she told Fox News Digital.

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She argued that the party, in her eyes, abandoned the working class and ignored Americans like her family in Kansas.

“It was also seeing the way the people that I knew in progressive politics looked at people in the middle of the country. People like my family who had voted for Obama and then voted for Donald Trump, and they really just had a disdain for them. They truly did view them as deplorables. And then it got even worse when I saw them actually decide to write them off. To say that they would not even try to persuade them to vote for us anymore because there was no point,” she told Fox News Digital.

“At that point, I knew the party was doomed, and I think I just experienced so much abuse working in the movement that at some point I got fed up and I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this, like what other options have they given me?'” Barker added.

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In her new book, “Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative,” Barker writes about her trepidation and hesitance to vote for Kamala Harris after the party chose her to replace President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2024.

“I would say that Kamala Harris was me seeing in real time the manifestation of everything the Democrats had become. They were a party that was loud but said very little. They were a party without substance. They were empty. They were hollow,” she told Fox News Digital.

“When I went to the DNC, I only saw Kamala talk about abortion and shouting out joy,” Barker recalled. “She wasn’t focused on the southern border, she wasn’t focused on the economy. She wasn’t connecting to the pain that people like my mom were experiencing in Missouri and it just became too much. And when they had Oprah Winfrey out to speak to tell us all that we should be feeling joy and to ignore everything that we were feeling, I had enough and I left. I left the convention before she even spoke.”

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Barker was on site for one of the first meetings between Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and then-House candidate Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, when the pair flew to Kansas to stump for Brent Welder, a progressive House candidate who Barker was fundraising for at the time, she explains in her book.

While at the time Barker felt that Ocasio-Cortez could and should run for president, she now feels that the progressive congresswoman and other members of the “Squad” represent everything that’s wrong with the party.

“I think AOC in 2018 and the ‘Squad’ members that came out of her rise have actually done the most damage to the Democratic Party,” she told Fox News Digital.

“I actually think that Bernie Sanders ran a very different campaign in 2015 and 2016 than how he is today. I think back then he was more moderate on issues like immigration. He was more moderate on guns, he wasn’t anti-gun, you know, he didn’t really talk about identity politics. And I think with the rise of AOC, she was identity-obsessed. And so was Ilhan Omar, and so was Jamaal Bowman,” Barker continued.

As a fundraiser for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and Left Rising, Barker said she raised money for progressive candidates. Barker argued the party’s production of far-left stars like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani shows that Democrats are learning the wrong lessons from their 2024 losses.

“There was a brief period of time after the 2024 election when I really thought that maybe Democrats would learn lessons — losing multiple times to Donald Trump. I mean, come on. Like, what more do they need to wake them up? And instead, I just saw them go further to the left, with Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and all these DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] candidates that kind of have sprung up over the last cycle,” she told Fox News Digital.

She attributed the DSA and other progressives’ rise to the groups’ alleged newfound willingness to deal in dark money.

“The biggest difference between then and now, and part of the reason we just saw somebody like Darializa Chevalier win in New York, is because the progressives, the DSA, they have learned how to utilize outside, independent expenditure, dark money super PACs to their benefit. They used to be afraid to go there because it contradicted with their principles, but after 10 years they’ve wised up and they’ve actually started playing the same games as the establishment and in many ways have created the new donor establishment in the Democratic Party, and I think that’s what many people don’t realize,” Barker told Fox News Digital.

A spokesperson for Chevalier denied the charge that she takes corporate PAC money in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“Darializa does not take corporate PAC money, AIPAC money, ICE money, or money from people looking to harm or push people out of this community. She is accountable only to the people of this district. That’s a win for every tenant, every immigrant, and every working person in this district who deserves a representative who actually answers to working class people instead of corporate donors, CEOs, or lobbies. Our campaign was not only the first challenger candidate in NY-13 history to pass the $1 million raised mark, but Darializa also raised that staggering sum as a first-time, working class candidate from more than 10,000 individual donors and with an average donation of just $66,” the statement read.

Dark money and donors, Barker claimed, play a much larger role in progressive politics than most voters know.

“Most of the messaging is crafted by heads of organizations, consultants and especially donors,” she told Fox News Digital.

“You know, I talk about one donor in my book, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress from Texas, and she ran a big donor network and at the same time was interfacing on campaigns and working with candidates. And they have a lot of influence over what candidates talk about, you know. It’s hard to say no to someone who knows so many wealthy people and can connect to so many different people when they’re giving you advice on what policies to adopt and how to speak about policy,” she continued.

“I would say the majority of the ideas in the Democratic Party are not from the grassroots. But ironically, and this is kind of interesting, I think a lot of the base now at this point has been radicalized, so they are not necessarily disagreeing with what the Democratic elites are pushing,” Barker added.

She explained the anatomy of a progressive pet policy and how the preferred party lines work their way from donors down to voters.

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“It’s a combination of donors and consultants and the heads of organizations that push candidates into adopting their policy positions. When I was working with the far-left, around the year of 2020, something that I saw that was extremely worrisome to me actually was that any organization — it didn’t matter if they were a veterans organization, just focused on veterans issues, or if they were a healthcare organization, just trying to focus on healthcare — donors demanded the concept of intersectionality to bring to all messaging related to these issues,” she told Fox News Digital

“So that meant that if you were talking about veterans issues, you also had to be talking about racial justice or environmental justice or criminal reform justice. So they kind of pushed all of these other very unpopular, far-left social issues and moved them into the economic issues as well in a way that completely eroded their trust with the public and pushed people like me further away from them,” Barker concluded.

Fox News Digital contacted the Democratic Socialists of America, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, Chevalier, Sanders, Omar, Bowman and Hunt-Hendrix, via her Way to Win organization, for further comment.