“We’re one, but we’re not the same / We get to carry each other, carry each other.”
— U2
These photos from the historic midterms, most taken on election night, carry something largely missing from public life in the Trump era: dignity, partnership, spirit, and compassion.
Never More Than a Cynical Slogan
This viral Talarico-Hinojosa victory photo op, posted jointly to their Instagram feeds on election night from the Texas favorite Whataburger, does more than celebrate a tremendous populist win. It reclaims the hometown America that MAGA claimed as its own and, in doing so, signals the movement’s collapse. What powered “Make America Great Again” was a mythology of a white, middle-class America: close families, church on Sunday, safe streets, a town where everyone knew each other, and everyone (but the man of the house) knew their place.
Here, the throwback charm of this Whataburger booth affirms a pluralistic version of that America and blows up a mean-spirited movement, varnished in false nostalgia.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Two days before the election, at a Dubuque rally to help boost her chances in a tight contest, Trump told the crowd about Ashley Hinson’s weight loss, even though, by his own account, she had asked him, “Please, sir, don’t do this.” When she finally joined him onstage after Trump had rambled for nearly two hours, Evan Vucci framed Hinson flexing in front of a phalanx of men in MAGA caps. Reduced to a sexual object, she resorted to the one language of strength the room respects: a man’s. A woman running for the U.S. Senate, reduced to countering the president’s body-shaming with her biceps. May we never have to witness such a humiliation again.
Several of the most consequential victories were forged in gender pairs. Hinojosa and Talarico campaigned jointly in Texas, while Ossoff and Bottoms, described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a political tag team,” also appeared repeatedly across Georgia. You could see the same with Acton and Brown in Ohio and El-Sayed and Benson in Michigan. The visuals deliver a stunning rebuke to Trump’s “us vs them,” “me over we” and, especially, “he over she.”
As the Trump administration casts off its last few women (so long, Susie Wiles!), the Democrats’ walk of unity is so counter to Trump’s misogyny and the Epstein stain that its social impact is hard to gauge. Still, the raised hands of new same-state governors and senators offer immediate hope for repairing the more legislative bonds.
Bursting the Bubble
When Paxton, then Trump, branded Talarico "Talafreako," his campaign put it on T-shirts, which became its best seller. In the photo, the floating “logo” from a cap and the glow of TV election results in a supporter's glasses simply shout “back at you.” What I’m most looking forward to is the end of the 24/7 trash talk and infantile name-calling.
In Todd Heisler's photo for The New York Times, El-Sayed laughs through his victory speech while a woman behind him shouts, mouth wide open. One reading of this frame, the kind of slightly offbeat image the Times photo editors are so skilled at ferreting out, is to see it as commentary on the failed effort to paint the senator-elect as an angry radical. If anyone in the frame looks fierce, it isn't him.
This photo, shot through holes in a rusted steel sheet, plays like a shell game: Collins in one hole, her supporters and their signs in another. It fits how she operated, showing distance from Trump and her party mostly when her vote didn’t matter to the outcome.
Feeling Returns
The Trump era didn’t just coarsen our politics. It numbed us. As a clinical psychologist, I found the hardest thing to witness was the ostracization of feeling itself as a weakness. Each photo below, in its own way, captures part of that recovery.
You cannot return to feeling without a tsunami of grief for all that was lost, unacknowledged, and broken, much of it for years to come. That is what makes this image, of a voter bringing her sticker to Alex Pretti’s memorial, so achingly painful and, at the same time, inspiring for what it acknowledges. She reaches for a pole already studded with red “I Voted” stickers. Nowhere has the damage been more pronounced and ongoing than in ICE’s predation. May the tsunami give the new Democratic majorities enough steam to rein in the agency.
What returns isn’t only grief. It’s dignity, too. The pleats of Dr. Jukaku’s dress, the drape of her headscarf, the dark beads at El-Sayed’s wrist. After years of a politics that flattened everyone, here is the fabric of a faith and a culture on the night Michigan sent the first Muslim to the U.S. Senate.
The first openly gay man elected to the Senate, and New Hampshire voters hardly blinked. For the mostly white conservatives left in the GOP caucus, it’s an affront. For everyone in the hate business, it’s a warning that the tide has turned on anti-LGBTQ laws and harassment. Is his husband, Vann Bentley, modeling Pappas’ swearing-in, or just waving hello? Either way, get used to it.
In a politics that ran on hate and treated love as weakness, Talarico put the word on his podium. Coming from a seminarian, “Love thy neighbor” carries the authority of scripture, which makes it easier to hear. But the radical part was the love itself, said plainly, in Texas. Or as John Lennon put it, relating to “All You Need is Love” as sloganeering: “My art is dedicated to change.”
Fresh Light
The most familiar expression from last Tuesday night: shock. Glee was a close second, as in Julia Demaree Nikhinson’s photo for AP from El-Sayed’s party in Detroit. Both were made sweeter by the memory of so many election nights over the past decade that started off hopeful and then went south, or were bad from the start.
GOP watch parties produced plenty of pained faces. What makes this one worth it is the look of torment, the kind MAGA spent a decade dishing out, now returned.
Trump on the phone, promising (again) he can work with Democrats, rightly ignored. Make America boring again.
More significant is the look on this kid’s face, in the hat and the suit, as reality lands. Nothing pained me more over the Trump era than photos of children at his rallies mirroring the man and his uniform. Let one legacy of the blue tsunami be that they learn there’s another way to love a country. In the near term, grant them an endless supply of the new empathy.
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