I voted for Trump. Then the moms came for me.

I grew up a Democrat and worked for its biggest progressive stars. Then I voted for Trump—and watched my community turn on me.

My close friends blame me for everything that Donald Trump does.

One year ago I, a lifelong Democrat, wrote in The Free Press that I had just voted for Trump. I realized that my party had turned its back on working-class families like my own—in favor of identity politics, free trade, and open borders.

Many people warned me about publishing the essay. They told me the reaction would be brutal, and they were right. Strangers on the internet relentlessly harassed me. Death threats flooded my inboxes. People accused me of being a Russian asset.

They also told me that the left would use it against me when I tried to critique the way the United States was governed in the future.

They were right about that, too.

Over the past several months, I’ve seen many examples online of Trump supporters who express regret for their vote and are immediately demeaned, with comments like: “I never thought the leopards would eat my face!” or “You voted for this!”

Let’s get this straight: I don’t regret leaving the Democratic Party. During Trump’s second term, the president has done many things I support: secure the border; rein in diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; broker foreign peace deals; and try to bring back manufacturing jobs.

Millions of former Democrats cast the same ballot as I did in 2024. We were disgusted—and desperate. And the story of our being demonized for doing so has been told before. The bigger story is that the same demonization is still happening—not only to hardcore Trump supporters but to those who dare to approach the biggest issues of our day with nuance or, even worse, to change their minds.

EVAN BARKER’S BOOK IS ABOUT HOW THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY LOST ITS SOUL.

I cast my vote based on the information I had at the time. Democrats had swung so wildly away from the party I once knew, and they needed a hard reset to find themselves again.

They still do. It’s clear that my former party has unraveled, not only in its policy focuses but in its attitude. And after spending most of my life in the belly of the beast, I know I can explain why.

That’s what I’ll be doing in my first book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. The book, out next summer, will focus on my years working with some of the biggest progressive stars, where I had a front-row seat to my party’s hijacking by out-of-touch activists, coastal elitists, and powerful special interests.

In other words, it will be a firsthand account of how my old party lost its soul.

My story begins one year ago. After coming home to San Francisco from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I posted a video on TikTok. “I’m not voting for Kamala Harris,” I said into the camera.

When I posted the video, I had only 60 followers. The next morning, there were millions of views and thousands of comments. Overall, the video received about 10 million views across X and TikTok.

The reactions were so overwhelming that the same day, I reached out to a psychiatrist over Zoom. When I told her that I wasn’t voting for Harris, she went silent. “Why?” she asked, and then proceeded to argue with me: “It’s so vitally important Trump not be reelected,” she said, “for civil society, for human rights.”

This is why there are so many secret Trump voters, I realized.

THE BOOK RECOUNTS BARKER’S TIME WITH RISING PROGRESSIVE STARS INSIDE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. (COURTESY OF AUTHOR)

Several weeks later, I explained in my essay that I had grown up in a union family near Kansas City, Missouri, and spent years working for hard-left candidates endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the Democratic Party had stopped paying attention to people like my family. Policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and open borders had hollowed out manufacturing jobs in Missouri. The working class was further alienated by leftist approaches to gender ideology and critical race theory.

The fallout was far more severe than anything I could have conceived. Friends of more than 15 years stopped speaking to me. People who were at my baby shower or who gave speeches at my wedding vanished from my life. In a WhatsApp group for moms in San Francisco, someone sent around the article I wrote, and I was vociferously attacked.

Eventually, I was booted from parenting groups—then let back in—and then booted again for expressing opinions deemed problematic. My biggest violation was supporting immigration enforcement (a majority viewpoint in America). But to the moms of San Francisco, that was seen as a monstrous moral horror born of pure racial animus.

For a while, the fallout was manageable—until my then–2-year-old son became a target. Before my essay, he was invited to an endless rotation of birthday parties and playdates. Overnight, this all stopped. A friend told me there were discussions all over the parenting communities about how “problematic” I was. Then, my son was denied entry to a private preschool, which multiple moms told me was likely due to my political beliefs.

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There was no choice but to move. Six months ago, my family and I left San Francisco and resettled in a town in northern California.

My son has been integrated into the community here, and he’s happy. Still, I worry that one day, the parents at his new school will find out who I am, or what my beliefs are, and again he will be punished.

I’ve spent the last year processing everything that has happened. How has the Democratic Party become so out of touch with the average voter, and so vicious to anyone who calls it out for being so?

The Democratic Party has become captured by young, mostly affluent staffers and consultants, who are completely insulated from the effects of their lax policies.

That is the motivating question of my book. For years of my life, I sat in mind-numbing Democratic Party fundraising sessions, where candidates begged rich people for money. I watched campaign staff and consultants weaponizing their “marginalized” racial or gender statuses to undermine colleagues and destroy rivals. I sat in meetings where women openly demeaned men. I worked personally with dark-money interests that elected people like Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney who managed the city’s crime, homelessness, and drug problems so poorly that voters recalled him in 2022. In other races, I worked closely with the very same consultants and operatives who just helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City.

The Democratic Party has become captured by young, mostly affluent staffers and consultants, who are completely insulated from the effects of their policies. And by pressuring the leadership to focus on subjects like climate change, racial justice, and abortion instead of the economy, jobs, and healthcare, they’ve led the party off a cliff.

“I DIDN’T VOTE FOR TRUMP ANTICIPATING THAT I WOULD AGREE WITH EVERYTHING.” (COURTESY OF AUTHOR)

I still carry the guilt of having overlooked the résumés of qualified white men, or uttering statements like, “White men are the worst.” If our political environment needs anything, it is more grace—for each other, and for ourselves. That’s the only way to make peace and move on.

And we have a long way to go. My book isn’t only for Democrats. I didn’t vote for Trump anticipating that I would agree with everything.

And sure enough, I think his approach to healthcare is wrong, among other things.

I was born with a rare lung disease called primary ciliary dyskinesia, meaning that I rely on daily antibiotics and expensive medical equipment to stay alive. President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act saved my life. I am saddened that the Trump administration has slashed Medicaid—a program I’ve needed in the past—and allowed ACA subsidies to expire.

Trump has also discussed repealing the ACA entirely. That’s terrifying. It could make me ineligible for health insurance or force me back into underfunded, high-risk insurance pools. It’s also bad politics. Trump’s promise to protect social safety net programs is how he drew disaffected Democrats like me into his fold in the first place.

If Democrats want to win back families like mine, they don’t need to spend tens of millions of dollars to study us; they just need to listen to our stories. And if Republicans want to keep winning families like mine, they need to act when the American people tell them things are too expensive. They need to stop cutting social programs—especially when so many are struggling.

We all know what happens when a party turns its back on the working class.

I frequently go with my son to the local library in our new town. It’s still a liberal community, and the children’s book section is a collage of books on topics from childhood gender transitions to anti-racist babies. I uncomfortably move my toddler past this virtue-signaling babble and toward the classics, like Corduroy and Winnie-the-Pooh. At the same time, I refrain from revealing my beliefs to other parents—to protect myself, yes, but more importantly, to protect my son.

I know this fear can’t last forever, and I’d like to be a part of making that transition happen. Which is why a smile spreads across my face when I think about the aisle just behind the children’s section, where the nonfiction books sit. One day, soon, my story will be there: proof that our country is moving to a point where all diversity, especially diversity of thought, is promoted freely and fairly, for all.

**NOTE: this essay was originally published in The Free Press on Tuesday, Nov. 18th**

Evan Barker, a writer living in Northern California, is a former Democratic operative. Her debut book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative is available for preorder.

Follow her Substack, listen to her podcast, The Evan Barker Podcast, and follow her on X @Evanwch or on IG @Evanbarkerig.