Many people think there’s too much money in politics, but for the few who actually spend that money, there are more pressing problems.

Money remains critical to success in politics, and yet it’s just not buying what it has in the past. The hitmakers of American politics are running out of fresh ideas on which to spend the massive influx of dark money pouring into the process.

Money has certainly helped this year — see, Georgia — but it has also hurt. See, Michigan. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), traditionally one of the more formidable lobbies, spent $32 million on the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, part of a gigantic $98.2 million spent in that primary, almost all of it to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, who won with about $7 million.

So much money, so many fruitless ways to spend it. We could speak, of course, of My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, who has pledged to pay $825,000 for a hand recount in the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary which he lost by 11 points, even though he has testified in court that his finances are in “ruins.” But there are lots of examples involving those who should know better.

The Republican Governors Association spent $3.6 million attacking Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. Were they laying down the first line of attack for Republican Tom Tiffany against Hong, the Democratic favorite to be his opponent? Or were they expecting a backlash that would help Hong, who they thought would be the easiest Democrat to beat?

Either way, that was money wasted. Hong lost.

Most of the vastly outspent candidates who have won this year have been Democrats who identify with the Democratic Socialists of America — if only for the past few months, in the case of state Rep. Angie Nixon in Florida, who was outspent 16-to-one by Alex Vindman in the Florida Senate primary and won by 10 points. But the forces which have caused so much money to miss its mark have been building in the political system for years.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a spurt of announcements of medical breakthroughs which experts say represent a giant step toward a much more personalized way of analyzing and treating cancers and other diseases. The art of political messaging and medical science have gone in a roughly similar direction, from mass medical treatments and mass political appeals to personalized medicine and targeted political appeals.

But so far there have been no giant steps toward a more personal politics, just a race to keep up with the latest trends in social media. Campaigns spend way too much on television ads that fewer and fewer people see, and a growing amount of money on gimmicks that may never connect. The old way of reaching people doesn’t work anymore, and the new way doesn’t work yet.

Money can still buy you an introduction, and if you know how to do it and can spend $108 million as Rick Jackson did in the Republican primary, it can buy you a darn good one. But in an era of hardening partisanship, it would take an awful lot of money — not that most campaigns even try anymore — to change voters’ minds.

Of course, political money also has to pay for the rental on the headquarters site, the fundraiser(s), the pollster, the motorcade and the inevitable shakedowns. In a larger sense, every steak that every lobbyist buys for a legislator in every state capital in the United States is paid for with political money. These are financial affairs conducted under well-understood, if loosely observed, rules. Like it or not, the participants all understand what they’re paying for.

We’re talking specifically about that part of the system that has to do with raising money and spending it to get elected, the part which has been dramatically affected by the U.S. Supreme Court rulings beginning with Citizens United in 2010 and continuing to June of this year when the Court struck down limits on what the national parties can spend on candidates’ campaigns.

In the wake of those rulings, we’ve got a gusher of money flowing into a system that hasn’t figured out yet what to spend it on.

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