Democrats adrift

After President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive election win this month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., had questions. She asked her followers on social media how someone could vote for her, one of the most progressive liberals in the House of Representatives, and for Trump on the same ballot.

“It’s real simple,” one user responded on X. “Trump and you care for the working class.” Others said: “You and Trump signified change,” and “[I] felt like I didn’t have a choice after Biden’s administration.”

Across the country, Trump gained ground this election in typically blue areas, such as Chicago’s 41st Ward, and among traditionally liberal voting blocs such as Latino men. White, college-educated voters were the only bloc from whom Harris drew more votes than President Joe Biden did in 2020. Democrats who made the switch to Trump this year told me they felt like the party has become so focused on causes and donors that it has lost touch with the concerns of average Americans.

For former Democratic fundraiser Evan Barker, this year’s summer convention in Chicago was the last straw.

“Kamala Harris was out there stumping with Oprah Winfrey and all these other celebrities, telling everybody to just have joy and freedom and that everything was going to be great because they were the vibes campaign,” Barker said. “They never really addressed the economic pain. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was out there buying people’s groceries and dressing up as a McDonald’s worker.”

Up until this year, Barker was a lifelong Democrat. She helped local, House, and Senate candidates fundraise for their campaigns. She said a widening disconnect with voters exists because of what she calls the “fundraising treadmill.”

“Candidates spend up to 10 hours a day just dialing rich people and begging them for money,” Barker said. “Most Americans don’t realize this, but if a candidate is trying to win, 80% of their time is spent talking to donors, not to regular people. Candidates will say one thing publicly and then a completely different thing on the phone with a donor.”

Barker said most major donations to Democratic candidates come from donors in only four cities: San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

“We had all of these expert Ivy League economists telling everybody that inflation wasn't a problem, that the economy was doing better than ever. And that was not the reality for lower income people,” she said. “The highly educated base that is now the Democratic Party, the suburbanites, might have been insulated from this pain. But I’m from a working class family. I saw the pain that they were experiencing, and I saw the way the Democratic Party had turned their backs on them.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., with Evan Barker Photo by Evan Barker

While Harris styled much of her campaign as a defense of democracy, Trump hammered home an economic rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration. Now, Democratic lawmakers say it’s time to correct course. In Washington, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez narrowly won reelection in a district that Trump won by 4 points.

“There is not a spreadsheet in the world that is going to make people feel better about having to take groceries out of their cart,” Gluesenkamp-Perez said on MSNBC. “Start from there and then talk about solutions here at home. No one’s going to listen to you if you just say things aren’t as bad as they think they are.”

According to a CNN exit poll in 2020, roughly 20% of voters said they were worse-off economically than four years prior. This year, that number had grown to 50% of voters.

Historically, voters tend to favor change in an election year, opting for whichever party is not currently in power, said Mark Mellman, who runs a polling and consulting firm that has been helping Democratic candidates since 1982.

“The big question in this election always was which was going to be more important to voters: the fundamentals of the economy and popularity of the incumbent, or Donald Trump’s many failures and failings?” Mellman told WORLD. “Now we have the answer.”

In Erie, Pa., registered Democrat Gene Ricci voted straight-ticket Republican this year.

“I just don’t like the way the Democratic Party’s been the past 10 years,” Ricci told WORLD on Election Day. “There just seems to be a lot of lies and the same old rhetoric from them.”

Barker, the former Democratic fundraiser, said the Democratic Party initially appealed to her because of her working class, Midwestern background. She’s leaving the door open for voting for another Democratic candidate in the future.

“Trump won me over. That doesn’t mean the Republican Party wins me over,” Barker said. “There are factions within the Republican Party that, quite frankly, I don’t trust. I’m an independent who believes in Donald Trump. I think he was the better candidate for working class people based on his policies of tariffs, and his policies of making things in America again, keeping American jobs in America.”

Since going public about her support for Trump in an online essay, Barker said her San Francisco community has turned on her.

“I’ve had friends tell me that they feel sorry for my son because I’m his mother and I voted for Trump,” Barker told me. “I don’t know what further wake-up call they need, but so far they’re not learning anything.”

Mellman said Democrats must improve the party brand going forward, but he does not think a shift to the middle would have helped this year.

“We do need to embrace a swing to the moderate, but it’s not the reason this election was lost,” he said. “The fact is in this election, in this electorate, there are more Republicans than Democrats by about four points. This presidential election, it seems to me, was really a referendum on the circumstances, and the circumstances were not very good.”