Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, by Evan Barker (Threshold, 288 pp., $29.00)

Moderates in the Democratic Party increasingly worry that the far-left faction could undermine the party’s electoral competitiveness and eventually take control of the party itself. Yet the response from moderates so far has emphasized accommodation over confrontation. From their perspective, it may be better to welcome Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned candidates into the fold and hope that the demands of governing temper their revolutionary fervor. This strategy of containment and assimilation rests on the assumption that the radical elements remain sufficiently distinct from the rest of the Democratic Party.

Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, a new memoir by former Democratic insider Evan Barker, challenges that premise. Barker spent more than 15 years rising through Democratic politics, raising money for establishment candidates before becoming a director at Left Rising, a fundraising firm dedicated to supporting insurgent left-wing candidates and causes that challenge the party establishment, including several members of  “the Squad” in Congress. But as Barker moved further left, she became increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party itself. In 2024, after attending the Democratic National Convention and leaving more alienated than when she arrived, Barker announced that she could not support Kamala Harris. She wound up voting, of all things, for Donald Trump.

Barker’s account of her career offers a firsthand look at the increasingly blurred line between the Democratic Party’s insurgent Left and the rest of the Democratic ecosystem. Rather than depicting two clearly separate political worlds, her story shows how closely connected they have become. The arc of her career, from volunteering on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign to her eventual consulting for progressive district attorney candidates, complicates the notion of an outside insurgency infiltrating the Democratic establishment. In Barker’s telling, one grew out of the other.

She entered politics through Obama’s campaign as a high school volunteer, at precisely the moment Democrats were pioneering a more personal and emotionally resonant electoral politics, which encouraged supporters to connect their own stories to a sense of shared purpose and political urgency. The approach was particularly powerful for a generation beginning to experience politics through social media.

A young Barker was perfectly suited to this kind of politics. Diagnosed with a rare genetic lung disease, she came to understand her access to health insurance through the political fight over Obamacare. Her illness and her experience growing up in a working-class family in the Midwest no longer felt merely personal. They belonged to a larger political story about what was wrong, who was responsible for fixing it, and what collective action could accomplish.

Experienced politicians understand the distinction between campaign rhetoric and the compromises required to govern. Sweeping promises and emotional appeals mobilize voters, but once in office, political and fiscal constraints inevitably emerge. Obama-era Democrats, however, were pursuing something more immersive—and, as they are learning nearly 20 years later, more institutionally volatile. Drawing on organizing traditions rooted in the left-wing movements of the 1960s, including Saul Alinsky’s model of community organizing and the public narrative-building framework later developed by Marshall Ganz, Obama’s first presidential campaign not only asked supporters for their votes but also trained them to tell their stories and to experience politics with the emotional intensity of a social movement. Barker recalls campaign offices beginning voter outreach with staff chanting “Fired up! Ready to go!” before picking up the phones.

In an earlier era, much of this intensity might have faded after Election Day. But emerging social media and a wave of “social justice and movement building” funding in the early 2010s kept the energy going even after campaigns were over.

Barker’s subsequent journey through Democratic politics highlights the frustrations experienced by many younger staff and volunteers when they began to experience the gap between political expectations and what could feasibly be achieved through policy. Then in her early twenties, she began as a fundraiser for moderate Democrats. But she quickly grew frustrated with candidates who spoke in sweeping moral terms while showing little interest in the policies that mattered most to her.

One congressional candidate whom Barker calls “Karen,” for example, centered her campaign on resisting Trump but showed little interest in the health-care concerns that had drawn Barker into politics. When donors asked about Medicare for All, Karen responded: “We can’t just give it all away.” To Barker, such candidates seemed more interested in holding office than using political power to transform people’s lives.

Her frustration with the Democratic establishment initially drove her further left. Barker concluded that establishment Democrats had not promised too much—they had believed too little. She sought out candidates who seemed more willing to act on their promises. In 2019, she joined Left Rising, placing herself firmly within the progressive movement just as its influence peaked. By then, the far Left had developed a sophisticated network of candidates, donors, advocacy groups, PACs, and campaign firms capable of converting movement demands into electoral power.

The protests following George Floyd’s death in 2020 dramatically narrowed the distance between the activist Left and mainstream Democratic politics. Ideas once confined to the margins—from abolishing cash bail to defunding the police—entered the national political conversation as Democrats and allied advocacy groups embraced the broader language of criminal-justice reform.

Barker helped carry that momentum into its next phase. Left Rising assigned her to Real Justice PAC, a group founded to elect progressive district attorneys nationwide. Barker helped its candidates find fundraising staff, organize donor contacts, and raise money. She worked with campaigns connected to prosecutors including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Kim Gardner in St. Louis, and she describes a well-funded network of activists and donors intent on reducing prosecutions, eliminating cash bail, and remaking the criminal-justice system through local district-attorney races.

At first, she believed in the project. Even as crime and disorder grew more salient, she dismissed concerns about progressive prosecutors as right-wing propaganda. But observing movement rhetoric put into governing practice opened her eyes. The 2022 recall of San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin offered an early sign that even voters in one of America’s most progressive cities had limits. The issue became more immediate after Barker departed Left Rising, became a mother, and remained in San Francisco. “To be honest,” she writes, “I never understood just how bad the effects of the anti-policing movement were until I lived in San Francisco with a toddler.” Within a year, she says, her car was burglarized four times, her garage was broken into, and visible drug use and disorder became part of her daily experience.

Barker’s experience with crime illustrates a broader pattern in the book. Many of the ideas she embraced sounded compassionate and morally urgent. But then she saw their consequences colliding with her real life.

Nothing Left is more valuable as an insider account than as a work of political analysis. Barker can be self-indulgent, and the book lingers too long on personal slights and her self-declared status as a member of the working class. Nevertheless, her story offers a useful way of understanding the tensions now confronting Democrats.

Barker’s story suggests that the establishment may have helped create the left-wing insurgency now challenging it. The organizing techniques adopted by Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign helped mobilize voters by encouraging them to connect personal identity and moral urgency to politics. Barker was shaped by that approach, as were many other millennials who came of age politically during Obama’s presidency. What began as a campaign technique extended beyond the election cycle and became a more lasting way of understanding and practicing politics.

In Barker’s account, Democratic positions on economics, race, gender, immigration, crime, and language become a single moral package. A voter may agree with the Left on health care, labor, and corporate power yet find that dissent on policing, immigration, or transgenderism puts him outside the coalition altogether.

The challenge facing Democratic moderates is bigger than just containing a handful of DSA candidates. If Democrats are serious about addressing the insurgent Left, they must recognize the role their own political environment has played in producing it. A party cannot indefinitely separate the rhetoric it uses to mobilize people from the expectations that rhetoric creates. When every political dispute is presented as a moral emergency, compromise looks like cowardice and moderation like betrayal, particularly to younger voters. Nothing Left tells the story well.

New York is about to make the same mistake its neighbors have made. On September 14, the New York State Board of Regents voted to eliminate Regents exams—the standardized tests administered to all New York high schoolers—as a high school graduation requirement and replace them with a system offering multiple graduation pathways.

The experiment is likely to end poorly. Just look at what’s happening in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, which enacted similar reforms. In 2024, Massachusetts voters repealed the state’s exit-exam graduation requirement—a passing score on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)—through a ballot measure supported by the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA). In 2018, Pennsylvania introduced alternative options for students struggling with standardized tests, which went into effect for the class of 2023.

Those states’ experiences show that weakening graduation requirements reduces accountability for schools. New York shouldn’t follow their lead. Replacing objective standards will introduce nebulous requirements that exist mainly to boost graduation rates rather than help students learn.

The MTA promised that Massachusetts schools would maintain their high standards without the MCAS requirement, but that proved false. The state’s former education secretary, James Peyser, reviewed the competency requirements at more than 50 school districts that replaced the MCAS graduation requirement. Districts resorted to defining competency as the lowest passing grade. Two-thirds of districts set the bar at D-, another 18 percent at D, and 15 percent didn’t specify at all what counted as passing.

The MCAS is still administered for grades 3 to 8 and grade 10. But newly released MCAS scores show declining scores, particularly for tenth-graders. In 2019, around 60 percent of students were at least meeting expectations in both reading and math. The pandemic took a toll, but there were sharp drops after 2024. In 2026, 45 percent of tenth-graders met expectations in reading and math. It’s unclear whether the results were primarily due to fewer students being academically prepared or whether students were less motivated to do their best on tests with low stakes. Neither of these explanations is particularly reassuring. Massachusetts is now trying to restore meaningful graduation requirements.

Pennsylvania offers multiple tracks for students to graduate, some of which don’t require passing state exams. The “evidence-based” pathway has become a particularly popular option in struggling districts like the School District of Philadelphia. Students with weaker state exam scores can provide three pieces of “evidence” to demonstrate that they are graduation-ready. In 2023, more than half of Philadelphia students demonstrated preparedness by means of state exams. But by 2025, only a little over a third of students demonstrated competency through state tests, while 40 percent of students graduated through the “evidence-based” pathway.

Under the “evidence-based” pathway, pieces of evidence can include AP test scores, service-learning projects, and community college courses. But an “industry-recognized credential” is, by far, the most popular option. Though such credentials—which, according to the state education department, “measure competence in core content and performance standards in a specific set of work-related tasks”—have some merit for demonstrating career readiness, students tend to select ones that are easy to earn but not highly valued by employers. In Philadelphia, teachers report that students at schools under pressure to boost graduation rates resort to options like a two-hour online ladder-safety course. The incentive for Philadelphia education officials is clear: on paper, they get to claim that graduation rates have improved, even as the majority of students struggle with basic reading and math.

New York’s incoming changes to graduation requirements combine vulnerabilities from both states. Under the system, students can submit portfolios and projects to demonstrate academic readiness. Using projects as replacements for state exams introduces a host of problems.

New York’s Performance-Based Learning and Assessment Networks (PLAN) pilot program, currently implemented at 23 schools and created to inform the state’s graduation overhaul, provides a glimpse of what’s to come. State leaders insist that they are not dumbing down expectations, but educators in the pilot program seem to believe that the alternative measures are less rigorous than the Regents exams.

For example, one school leader at Dana West Junior/Senior High School said that she would “love” to have an alternative assessment option, “because taking a test like that is hard for them.” Another leader at Brentwood High School said allowing students to submit portfolios would enable students to show how they’ve “mastered those standards, even if they do not pass the Regents [exams].” A student who understands the course content should be able to demonstrate that understanding regardless of the evaluation method.

Project-based assessments also put less emphasis on students’ core knowledge and create greater potential for AI misuse. For Algebra 1, Saugerties Senior High School highlighted student projects in which students talked about math but demonstrated very little knowledge of it. The school’s approach also appears unconcerned with “rote correctness.” One teacher said, “I’m not assessing if they know how to multiply. . . . I’m assessing what they got from the unit.” Meantime, an English class gave students nearly four weeks to write lyrics for a song about a social or personal issue. The length of time for this flimsy assignment, even if primarily conducted in class, gives students ample opportunity to use AI between classes.

The Regents exams avoid these issues while offering other benefits. They give students external motivation to care about their academic outcomes. They keep teachers on track. They make it harder for schools to weaken expectations just to graduate more struggling students. And they provide an efficient, transparent way to evaluate students.

New York state education leaders say the move away from the Regents exams is about lowering the stakes for students. In reality, they are relieving schools of the mandate to ensure that students are adequately prepared for graduation. Students will suffer the consequences later, in the real world, where the stakes are much higher.