The Inside Story: The Day Democrats Lost the Working Class

It used to be, in the not-too-distant past, that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party were blacks, Hispanics, and working-class whites. They proved a formidable coalition in electing both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to two terms each in the White House. But by the time Joe Biden left the Oval Office with his tail between his legs in 2024, the third leg of that triad, blue-collar whites, had all but abandoned the party, while the first two fell well short of their expected level of support. The Democratic brand had deteriorated so precipitously that Donald Trump waltzed to another four years even after all the ugliness at the tail end of his first term. Few thought it possible, but it was as much a humiliating defeat for Democrats as it was a triumph for Trump. You might even say they gift-wrapped it for Trump.

Democrats Losing It

What happened over those four years of the Biden era that drove a relatively healthy party into the ditch? Why did they embrace nakedly Marxist policies? Why did party elders allow the slow-motion shipwreck to overtake the party instead of steering the ship to safe harbor? It’s one thing for outside observers to reach conclusions, but when a progressive warrior like author Evan Barker, writing for The Free Press, blows the whistle on the insanity she witnessed over the last six years, we should sit up and pay attention. Her lament heads the article: “I spent my entire career helping progressives get elected. Then I watched my party abandon everything it claimed to stand for.”

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It brings to mind the answer Ronald Reagan once gave when asked why he left the Democratic Party: “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me.” And that is exactly what has happened with blue-collar voters who have seen the party of the poor and working class transform into the party of coastal elites. “Democrats now win 65 percent of Americans making over $500,000 a year,” Barker observed. “Democrats are also twice as likely to obtain four-year degrees as Republican voters. Twenty years ago, this was not the case.” As they willingly grovel before voters of color, leftists scorned white voters and asked them to accept Tim Walz as the model for the modern white American man. They hysterically decided to call Hispanics “Latinx.” They supported biological men playing women’s sports and defunding ICE, while opposing Voter ID. They catapulted onto the wrong side of all the 80-20 issues.

The Fateful Day    

The genesis of this extremism was a single fateful day in which a tragic incident was blown up into a national crisis by rampaging radicals. When George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, as hundreds of millions were already processing the deadly reach of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country essentially lost its mind. Violence swept across every major city. Communities and small businesses were destroyed. Normal people were targeted for their insufficient commitment to “anti-racism,” which demands that the white privileged class not just speak out but take specific action to combat “systemic racism.” As they sought to exploit the tragedy to build a new base of young progressive minorities, Barker realized that Democrats believed they would no longer need the white working class but, “As it turns out, all that did was push the white working class to the right.”

One year after the George Floyd affair, Barker says it dawned on her that “everything about the progressive movement had changed. I thought the avalanche was coming for the establishment Democrats. Instead, it came for people like me … Gradually, it began to hit me: I was no longer working for the same Democratic Party I had dedicated my life to in 2008. Progressives were just as out of touch as normal Democrats. There was nothing left of who they once were. The modern Democratic Party has gone off the cultural deep end.”

She exemplifies the craziness with a story about a politician who reprimanded her for questioning why his website said “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women.” “I told him men don’t have uteruses, and he snapped: “My brother had a baby!” Math became racist. Everyone suddenly had pronouns in their email taglines. On a Zoom call with a black woman candidate and a donor, the candidate said to the donor: “We can talk later, in a black space, a safe space.” She writes of how many consultants couldn’t get contracts from campaigns unless they were owned by women or minorities. “What’s your race?” donors would ask politicians on the phone. “I’m sorry, I am restricting my investments to women of color only.” One time we called a donor whose voicemail said: “If you are not a woman of color, please do not bother leaving a voicemail. I won’t donate to you.” 

The day George Floyd died was the day the Democrats descended into their own death rattle, embracing ideas long considered laughable and writing off the white male vote for years to come. But as Barker writes, “Democratic Party insiders need to realize: They can’t win without the white working class.” Their failure to stand up to noxious voices in their midst has extracted a price they continue to pay with the incursion of full-on socialists into their ranks. In her article and her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Barker describes herself as a “ruthless fundraiser” for progressive causes over more than a decade. But to say she had come full circle by 2024 would be a dramatic understatement, as she proudly proclaims, “I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”