“The year when money won nobody nothing”

Teddy Schleifer for CNN:

Almost all players, Republican and Democrat, acknowledge that their dollars had a far more limited impact than they themselves had predicted at the campaign’s starting gun.
What has perplexed the nation’s political financiers, according to more than a dozen interviews with leading players, is what 2016 has signaled — if anything — about the changing country. Some, including loyalists to Trump and Bernie Sanders, argue that they have crafted the new normal, pooh-poohing the rich as self-important and — in a painful indictment of the entire big-money world — proven to be powerless. A high-wattage, carefully cultivated super PAC? No need, they say. Have a real movement, and watch the money bloom eternal.
The other train of thought — often from the spurned corps of professionals who have, at some point, been cast as the elite bogeymen: Trump is a self-financed, larger-than-life aberration that tells us next to nothing about how money will rule in the post-Trump era. Super PACs, attack ads and the luxury fundraising circuit? How the game is played — now and forever.
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