Evan Barker raised tens of millions of dollars for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Jasmine Crockett. She worked with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Justice Democrats, and a consultancy called Left Rising. She was, by every measure, one of the most effective fundraisers the progressive wing of the Democratic Party had.

Then she voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Barker sat down with Hayley Caronia on the "Scrolling with Hayley" podcast and laid out what she saw from the inside of the machine she helped build. The Democrat party's strategy, she says, involves "identifying an economic issue and then racializing it." Take something that affects working people across the board — housing, wages, healthcare costs — and repackage it as a racial grievance. The economic problem doesn't get solved. The racial division gets deeper. And the consultants get paid.

She watched it happen in real time during the 2018 Kansas congressional race. Brent Welder, a white labor attorney running in Kansas City, had secured AOC's support. Then the internet noticed he was a white man running against a woman of color. A meme circulated depicting Welder and Bernie Sanders as "two white men attacking a woman of color." AOC's team got nervous. A donor called two hours before polls closed and pulled support — not because of policy, not because of polling, but because Welder's opponent checked the right identity boxes.

Barker also confirms what the 2024 election results already proved: the progressive coalition was never really about the working class. It was about the professional class that runs the campaigns, writes the talking points, and cashes the checks. She describes a party where both centrist and progressive factions weaponize identity when it's useful and discard it when it's not. The centrists, in her telling, are "socially to the left, but economically to the right" — which means they agree with progressives on every cultural issue that costs nothing and disagree on every economic issue that might cost donors.

The party's response to losing in 2024 has been instructive. Rather than reckoning with any of this, progressives blame centrists and centrists blame progressives. Barker saw it firsthand at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where the mutual finger-pointing was already underway before the votes were counted.

You can see more of Barker's interview here

The Democrats built a fundraising apparatus that could raise tens of millions on a single cycle. They built a messaging operation that could turn any policy debate into a culture war. They built a consultant class that gets rich whether candidates win or lose.

What they didn't build was a reason for Evan Barker to stay.