MARY
Hello everybody. I’m with my friend Adam Parkhomenko. Adam has one of my favorite Substacks, The Alt Media. It’s fantastic and it’s hysterically funny just when you think the news is so bad that there is no humor to be found.
ADAM
We make it worse with curses.
MARY
Well, that’s one of my favorite parts about it.
ADAM
Thank you for that.
MARY
So, Adam, first, I wanted to talk a little bit about this past year, electorally speaking. I think it’s safe to say that 2025 has been one of the worst years in modern American history. I call what we’re living through the horrors. But there has been some indication that the truth of what’s going on in the Trump regime might actually be breaking through to people. Can you to walk us through what happened in 2025 that should give Democrats a reason not just to be hopeful, but to plan and to strategize in very specific ways?
ADAM
Your question’s a great one. A lot of really good things happened this year. Of all the open seats up and down the ballot, either Democrats held their seats or Republicans held theirs. But in terms of flipping seats, as of two weeks ago, Democrats had flipped 25 seats and Republicans had flipped zero. which is huge. One example was the Miami Mayor’s race, which for almost three decades was in the hands of Republicans.
There were precincts where we saw the Democratic candidate outperformed Kamala Harris by 42 points. We saw the same thing two or three weeks ago in Kentucky where there was a 42% outperformance by the Democrat.
We’re all glad that the government is reopened. I’m not glad the two or three weeks ago that it reopened when Tim Kane and others in the Senate failed us. And that disappointment took away from some really big wins on election night. The weren’t just in Virginia and New Jersey though. We had big wins in Minnesota and two statewide wins in Georgia, which is an incredible sign for Senator Ossoff moving forward.
But the other piece is we’re seeing that not only are Democrats running incredible candidates at the local level, but they’re bringing out more voters. One thing we need to take from this is, from a national standpoint, we can’t go into states and tell them who should be running. What we’re seeing is a real wave.
I always say Republicans don’t win elections; Democrats lose them. I really think only we can fuck this up. My hope is that we’ll continue to do what we’ve been doing throughout the country and pass the torch. We have 80 year olds on the Democratic side who are running for reelection and haven’t even voted in four or five or six years in their own elections. And I’m glad to see that people are stepping up and primarying those folks.
MARY
I think that’s huge. You mentioned that Democrats held seats, Republicans held seats, Democrats flipped a lot, Republicans flipped none. I think it’s important to mention that even in very red states, Republicans who won, won by much smaller margins than those Donald carried those districts in in 2024. Is that another potential bellwether for us to be paying attention to?
ADAM
Yeah, that’s a great question. Marjorie Taylor Green, for instance, is a great example of somebody who made a decision not to run again effective January 5th. She’s resigning. There’ll be a special election within 60 days there. However, from what we’ve heard from her, there are a number of others that are going to retire. There are a couple interesting things about that.
One, we just saw another announcement of a retirement for next year by an incumbent Republican, but it won’t be effective until after the election. It would be nice if some of these Republicans that were stepping down did what Marjorie Taylor Green was doing and left now.
Two, if you’re looking at the Tennessee special election that just took place, Donald won that district by +22. The Republican won by less that 9%. You’ve got Republicans that are on the ballot up by a two, three, four-point margin. So, I think it looks good. I never really trust polling, but I do think that people are taking things into their own hands.
And one of the things that you and I and Waj and others have talked a lot about is that people would actually see the ramifications of their vote, even if they had voted for this guy two or three times. People are hurting and I don’t think that necessarily means that they’re becoming Democrats, but we see a lot of folks in states where you can become an independent moving that way.
Democrats have a unique opportunity right now not only to win, but to try to get some of those folks and keep them. Going back to your original question, I think from a national standpoint our party really needs to stop focusing on spending money and reaching out to this 34% that a hammer is not going to get through to.
Let’s do what Republicans do and talk to our base. Let’s remind them what we’re going to do. When we get the power, let’s not be afraid of it. We need leadership that is going to play by the rules, but also start tearing shit down, right? We need to energize our base and do that once we’re in office.
MARY
I absolutely love those takeaways from 2025. Tear shit down, talk to your base, fire them up, if not now, when, which leads us to 2026.
ADAM
One more thing: Your uncle says he’s giving out $12 billion to the farmers, but if you go on social media and you search soybeans, you search cattle, you search SNAP, any of these key programs, the only people talking about fixing them are Democrats. The key is, do people really think Democrats or Republicans are having calls to see how we can save SNAP? And this is Democrats every single day in Congress talking about farmers whose farms are up for sale right now and the suicide rate among farmers is higher than it’s ever been before.
I really this has hit every single corner of the country, and that will carry over into 2026.
MARY
To that point, I agree with you that the Democrats have forever, it seems, made the massive mistake of ignoring its own base and catering to the imaginary middle or even center-right Republicans. It might have been Adam Sewer who said, “Republicans and Democrats fear the Republican base, neither Republicans nor Democrats fear the Democratic base at all.” I think it’s time to make them afraid of us.
You said something earlier that’s very true as well. If Democrats run the right people in the right places and tailor their messages to their constituents and their lived experiences, then it’s not about partisanship anymore; it’s about telling people that you understand what they need and figuring out to give it to them.
I want to get back for a second to what you said about farmers. Farmers in this country are hurting. As you mentioned, they’re going bankrupt, suicide rates are going up. That is entirely down to Donald Trump’s horrific and failed economic policies, right?
ADAM
Absolutely. The tarriffs.
MARY
You mentioned that Donald announced he’s going to give American farmers a $12 billion bailout, but it’s the American people who are going to pay for that bailout and it’s necessary because of his catastrophic economic policies. This isn’t about catering to the base, it’s the Democrats letting people know that they care about the economic and physical and psychological and emotional wellbeing of Americans. Do you think the Democrats can finally do that?
ADAM
I don’t know that from a national standpoint we can. This week we were told that Democrats weren’t going to release their investigation into what went wrong during the 2024 election. I was a little disappointed Personally, I would have never committed to releasing it for two reasons: one, we’re winning; two, it doesn’t mean we’re not transparent, it means we’re not going to show our cards to Republicans. But by promising to release it and then no, that makes it a bigger story. Now everybody wants to see it.
MARY
Kind of like the Epstein files.
ADAM
Exactly.
I think Democrats are up to the job throughout the country. We’re always going to be held to a different standard by the press and we need to start to act like all that shit doesn’t matter and stay focused on what we’re focused on. We need to say, “Fuck off” to the press.
They report that Mandani has somebody in his cabinet who has a prior conviction? We have a rapist in the White House. Democrats spend more time getting to no rather than yes; we need to spend more time at the national level lifting up the Jasmine Crocketts of the world and other good communicators instead of trying to hide them.
And the other piece is the presidential election. We’re going to see folks start to get involved in the coming months and I think that’s a really good thing. And if you go back to the primaries in 2015 and 2016, during the Republican debates Donald Trump was saying crazy stuff about the people on stage.
And he won, right? I think we should tear each other apart, without the insults.
We should make sure we have the strongest candidate possible going into this and we have a real fighter. I want somebody who is going to commit to doing everything the base wants.
MARY
I love the point about making sure we end up with the strongest candidate who’s willing to fight because, unbelievably enough, people who are so inclined to support Donald and believe him are convinced that he’s fighting for them simply because he’s loud and obnoxious.
ADAM
One of our mutual friends posted this morning that this is a guy who is should be a greeter outside a failed casino right now.
MARY
It’s amazing to me that people look at Donald and see fighter, but they do. Democrats are so desperate for somebody who is actually going to be a fighter for them, who understands what’s at stake, and understands that this is not going to get won by playing by some rules that don’t exist anymore. We’re going to have to get in the mud and I’m all for go through whatever process it’s going to take to find that person.
ADAM
We may have one or two people step up that are saying everything we want to hear. And that’s okay if we have a real fighter that is just some diamond in the rough, but let’s make sure they are the right person. We’ve seen in Maine and other places that one viral video doesn’t necessarily mean that we know everything about them.
MARY
Exactly. We need to vet them and make them demonstrate that they are up for the fight and they understand what the fight is actually.
ADAM
And let’s vet all the Republicans too. There is no reason George Santos should have been elected. Part of that was a media failure too, but I think 60% of the failure to vet him was on the Democratic Party.
MARY
And Democrats should be doing opposition research on everybody and not leave it up to the media.
I want to talk a little bit about a new generic ballot that came out put out by Marist, which is a high-quality poll. And I can’t say it shocked me necessarily, but it made me get ahead of myself and I don’t want to do that. I’m going to share these numbers with you and tell me if you think I was right to feel not a little smug.
ADAM
That’s okay. We should after November. We should enjoy and we should win and we should keep going.
MARY
These numbers are quite something. There’s one number in particular I want to focus on. In this poll, people were asked, “If the 2026 election for Congress were held today, which party’s candidate are you more likely to vote for in your district?” Fifty-five percent of respondents said Democrats, 41% said Republicans, 41%, 3% said other—see, there’s no imaginary middle—and finally, the most import piece of data, 1% said unsure. That suggests to me that the Republicans don’t have a lot of room to maneuver.
ADAM
No. I always go back to the Mueller investigation. I had very high hopes and it was one of the most disappointing moments in my life. The nice thing about having zero expectations is you’ll never be disappointed, but you might be pleasantly surprised.
I think these numbers will probably stay pretty consistent, although things do tighten. The Trump regime is going to do anything and everything they it can to wag the dog. However, I think this is pretty baked in and it’s a really good sign.
We can’t have a litmus test. What we can have is competitive primaries. Let people pick who they want, but we can’t have people staying home. We need people to step up and get out there. I don’t think we will ever have anything like Donald Trump ever again, hopefully. I think that we have these moments in our country when we are tested. And I think that nobody will ever be able to get away with what he did again, but maybe we have to go through this to get to that other side. I think people are finally waking up.
MARY
You make this point often, and I think it must be made all the time: this is not an excuse for complacency by any stretch of the imagination. I think this poll is permission for Democrats, especially establishment Democrats, to get some courage and fight in a way they typically don’t. Heading into what is going to be a very trying year, what would you like to see congressional Democrats, the DCCC and others do to make sure they don’t let their guard down, and keep their base engaged and riled up because we should be riled up.
ADAM
Your question here touches on what is probably one of the most important topics I feel people fail to discuss on a daily basis. If you go back to the first Trump regime, they didn’t really know what they were doing. They were disorganized, they lost the House, and then they couldn’t get anything done. This time they came in with a plan and it was far worse than what we knew. We have a real opportunity right now to stop this in the tracks. There will be elections and what we need to do at the very least is take back the House.
If we can do that, we can put a stop to a lot of this shit. We can get control of the investigations. Given the numbers that you’ve mentioned, you never know what’s going to happen on the Senate side. But the key is the House. That’s not to take away though from the local elections. The DCCC needs to come to grips and understand that the best ideas don’t come from Washington DC. They need to listen to people. They also need to be a customer service hub. People want to get involved. You would think they could go to the DNC website and find a local committee, but that just doesn’t exist out there.
Some people like to write postcards, some people like to knock on doors. If somebody can put in an hour, they’re naturally going to give you a dollar. And I used to say, if you go to a horse race and somebody puts a dollar on a horse and somebody puts a million dollars on the horse, I guarantee you the person that puts the dollar on the horse is rooting louder than the person that puts down the million dollars. We are so focused on sending text messages for fundraising and emails for fundraising, and it loses the total experience and energy and excitement that people have.
Yard signs don’t win elections, but people want a fucking yard sign.
We need to kind of get back to the bread and butter and stop talking about what happened in November. Let’s do a daily press conference outside the White House, let’s do a daily press conference outside the East Wing that is now gone, which was supposed to be a $200 million project and is now $400 million. Those are the optics we need but we just don’t see that happen.
MARY
I’m really hopeful for 2026. I know though it is going to be a marathon that has to be run at a sprint so it’s going to be challenging. Professionally, it’s going to take a toll. We need voices like yours so, Adam, other than your phenomenal Substack, where should people follow you?
ADAM
Mary is the one that inspired us to get on Substack to begin with. It’s was a year as of this August, and it’s been incredible. Our biggest spike of growth came from Mary recommending us. We were very nervous about getting on this platform for a long time, and we did.
MARY
Awesome. Go subscribe to Adam’s Substack, The Alt Media. Adam, it’s always awesome to talk to you. Your perspective as a Democratic strategist is invaluable as is your understanding of what Democrats need to do and should be doing. Honestly, it helps keep me grounded because establishment Democrats have taken years off of my life and it’s always so good to talk to somebody who gets it. So thank you for everything you do. Have an amazing holiday.
And, everybody, thank you so much for hanging with us here at Substack Live. And I’m sure Adam and I will be seeing you before the New Year, but happy holidays if you’re celebrating.
