While political pundits are focusing on the massive amount of money that is going to be spent on the 2022 midterm elections, money in itself won't determine the fate of the election and, ultimately, control of both the House and Senate.
Election officials from states across the nation have begun to meet to address many of the challenges they foresee with the 2022 midterm election, with the idea that collaboration and sharing best practices may save the day.
But we need to keep a collective eye on the clock, with just over a year to go until the election. As we saw in the 2016 presidential election, when technology is used to disrupt an election, it takes longer than we expect to fix the issue.
Cybersecurity is one of the key issues that needs to be addressed for the upcoming elections. Political campaigns need to reach voters in safe ways and earn the trust of the voters. While technology has been a huge negative in recent years, one tech giant hopes to play a part in winning back this lost trust.
Google is offering cybersecurity training to state legislators and their teams for the 2022 midterms, a reflection of how far into the mainstream what used to be the stuff of science fiction has creeped. The goal of this training is to sensitize current and prospective lawmakers and their staff to the component parts of the nation's digital defense and to have voters trust the process more than they have in recent elections.
History tends to err on the side of a strong midterm election showing for the party that isn't in power. With a Democratic president and House, and a tie falling the Democrats' way in the Senate, it would not be a surprise to many experts if the Republicans had significant net gains in 2022. Between new voting restrictions and a general fear among some Democrats that it may not be as safe to vote in 2022 as it should be, what role can technology play in getting the kinds of big numbers that all democracies want in key elections, but also in safeguarding people who come out to vote?
Part of the discomfort many people have just over a year out from the 2022 midterms is questions about how safe it will be to vote in person and uncertainty about how widely available advance and mail-in voting will be in 2022. While it is too early to determine how valid these concerns in fact are, it's always perception that counts in determining whether people will actually cast their vote. Anytime people perceive physical threats of violence, it can be really beneficial to find creative uses of technology to help people understand the difference between what they see and hear in the media and actual reality.
Finally, we need to consider what role technology can play to expedite the coming legal challenges to the 2022 midterms. It is conceivable that courts may still be backed up across the nation by mid-2022, when the first legal challenges to election-related issues begin to be filed. If technology can help us quickly get through a lot of cases challenging aspects of the election, this will help prevent an election-related backlog that could slow down the legal process to the point that it essentially moots decisions. In other words, where the courts make a decision about the 2022 midterms with not enough time left to fully implement what the court says needs to be done, this hurts how the election is perceived.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.