A partial picture of campaign finance in 2016, with much still to learn, suggests that the fully rounded-out version may feature surprises and interesting twists. It will certainly influence, perhaps even redirect, the debate over reform.

For example:

The aggressively "outsider" Republican nominee is relying on the party apparatus to fund the basics of his campaign. Trump is succeeding with on-line fundraising, as one might expect from outsiders, but it is not enough without the party doing, or attempting to do, what is needed. How well will the party do? Meanwhile, the Super PACs have been slow to extend their support to this candidate of self-declared if disputed wealth: while this may change in the weeks ahead, the wealthy have so far declined to shower their funds on this candidacy, instead putting much of their resources into congressional races.

On the Democratic side, the Super PACs are active: the Washington Post’s Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy find that “once-reluctant Democrats have fully embraced” these entities as key requirements for being competitive. In the primaries, however, these PACs were a point of controversy and small donors financed an insurgent, outsider candidacy that was fully competitive with what the front-running candidate from within the party could muster. Meanwhile, while the rallying cry for reform remains Citizens United, the most prominent money behind the Super PACs money is individual and not corporate.

Any year can present in unusual fashion and it is hazardous to put too much weight on the experience with presidential elections or to overgeneralize from it. But in the months ahead, it is an experience that will be cited and argued over, and it will have its effect. One conclusion drawn may well be that we still don't know how the crazy-quilt campaign finance system influences the politics of the campaigns—favoring or disfavoring parties, opening (through the Internet) or narrowing (through the Super PACs) participation, exacerbating or balanced out incumbent advantage.

Beyond these considerations are the venerable reform objectives of controlling corruption and promoting equality. Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker speculates about the implications of a Clinton victory for the confirmation of a new Justice and a new Supreme Court majority willing to revisit Citizens United.  He asked Pam Karlan and Heather Gerken for their views and each splashes cold water on any excessive optimism that the court, even if it changed course, would make much of a difference to the accomplishment of traditional reform objectives.

Professor Karlan suggests that while Citizens United is a “shorthand” for the role of money in politics, that decision has little to do with the problem seen in campaign finance and its demise will not solve it. Professor Gerken does not go that far, but she does not see the Court as the prime mover in reform. Congress would have to act first, regulating Super PACs and other “shadow” groups, and she doubts that it will.

Matt Grossman and David A Hopkins have pronounced many decades of liberal reform to be a failure. In a new book, they argue that the 1970s reform program did not lead to the success of liberal policies but may have been primarily advantageous to "ideological Republicans." For a party that is "a coalition of social groups, each with pragmatic policy concerns," the Democrats wound up undermining the transactional politics among various interests that would produce their preferred policy outcomes. Making matters worse was a shift of voter sentiment against government-driven solutions. The Republicans, happy to oblige the popular sentiment by blocking legislation, fared better than Democrats actually interested in passing it. Grossman and Hopkins conclude that in the future, Democrats "should assess whether each potential change is likely to benefit the Democratic coalition or the more ideological Republicans."

The problem always is the hazard of predicting the partisan or policy impact of any reform measure. To the extent that Grossman and Hopkins are urging Democrats to guess, they are necessarily allowing for the fairly large possibility that they will guess wrong. And even the ways in which they may be wrong are not anticipated all that reliably. In other words, both the benefits and the costs--the shape of success and the look of failure--will be very hard to judge. The mistakes made can be costly.

None of this would matter if those promoting reform could satisfy themselves that it satisfied other measures of success. For example, do those reforms enhance public confidence in the political process, or lessen the risk of corruption in government? Not so much, it seems, which is not to say that things would not be worse on this score without the reforms. But if it is true that reforms have contributed little to the success of the progressive policy agenda, the absence of other consolations, like a government that enjoys the public’s confidence, only compounds the sense of failure and dissatisfaction.

The Grossman/Hopkins argument tends to strengthen the case for targeted modest reforms that don't rest on ambitious expectations about policy or partisan effects. Rather than each party trying to game which reforms will serve their particular interests, they might collaborate on purging the current regulatory system of its inanities, inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

The voting rights and campaign finance wars have been fought on terrain largely shaped by two major and controversial decisions: the Crawford case on voter ID requirements, and Citizens United on independent spending. Critics have lamented Crawford’s naiveté about the stated value and inevitable partisan misuses of ID requirements, but it seemed that supporters had going for them the “common sense” judgment that voters required to have an ID to board a plane can be reasonably asked to produce one to vote. So one might have thought that Crawford was here to stay, even as the Justice who wrote for the Court, John Paul Stevens, has expressed regret.

Citizens United got more bad press in many quarters for opening up direct corporate political spending and for giving a boost to Super PACs. Its author, Anthony Kennedy, continues to defend it. He points to the silver lining: the court’s brief, arguably cursory, salute to disclosure, even as Kennedy concedes it is not yet working in practice as he had hoped it would. The critics who think the court flipped open the Pandora’s Box of campaign finance have put whatever hopes on the antidote of disclosure, and more speculatively on a constitutional amendment to overturn the case’s core permissiveness.

In light of developments of recent weeks, it is interesting to consider where the law set in motion by these cases is heading.

Justice Ginsburg’s recent press comments have been noted mostly for her openly expressed disdain for the Trump candidacy. Less surprising in the remarks was the Justice’s “impossible dream” that Citizens United be overturned. She has said this before, and since she dissented in that case, there is not much news here, unless anyone still had doubts that for this Justice, the killing off of that decision is a priority.

The comment was reported at the same time as the Complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by Representative Ted Lieu and others who intend to set into motion the reconsideration the Justice is hoping for. And so it invites an appraisal of its prospects for accomplishing the Justice Ginsburg’s “impossible dream.”

As my colleague Marc Elias has pointed out, the FEC cannot succeed; this is a lost cause. When the Complaint fails, it may do little more than unnecessarily promote the belief that CU is here to stay. It is not clear why this is the best legal maneuver, or the most effective exercise in public communications, in the attack on Speechnow and Citizens United.

Aside from the question of strategy, the Complaint itself  is a surprisingly subdued performance. It has a bit the feel of going-through-the-motions: doing the least possible to set up the agency dismissal and the move to the courts. True, the Complainants knew that the outcome at the agency was inevitable and there is time later to build their argument. But the case they preview in the Complaint seems flat and this certainly can’t help the Complainants in their subsequent appeal.

Michael Kinsley intends a face slap to" liberals" by denying, as only he can (succinctly and entertainingly), that Citizens United was wrong.  He argues that the Court ruled correctly--“it was a good decision”--and vindicated First Amendment values.  He succeeds in drawing a little blood.  He notes that the same critics who say that money is not speech disagree with Citizens United precisely because they believe that money is speech, and they don't care for the volume and potential effectiveness of the speech that the decision allows for.  Fair point.  He raises the usual alarms about attempting to amend the Constitution to overturn the decision, and he concludes that the only solution to any undue corporate influence is politics: "if enough people are enraged enough by the imbalance of political power caused by money, they will vote against big money, which will turn it into a negative."

There is more something more to the dissatisfaction with Citizens United that Kinsley does not come to terms with.  It is in part an objection to the Court’s performance in the particular case.  As others not unsympathetic to the outcome but unimpressed with the work product have noted, the Court's craftsmanship left much to be desired.  It could have found for the aggrieved organization, Citizens United, on considerably narrower grounds.  Instead it chose to transform a case about in-theater and on-demand documentary distribution into a test of corporate free speech rights across the board. This level of ambition called for a high degree of execution, which was dramatically lacking in an opinion that, as Professor Michael McConnell has written, was “overly long and unfocused.”

Beyond these faults is one even more basic, which is the Court's chronic temptation to accelerate the movement of major issues from public debate and engagement to decisive judicial resolution.  The question of the corporation’s role in politics is complex and both politically and socially controversial.  There is no generally accepted answer, except that most concede that there are constitutional limits within which any such answer would have to be devised.  It would have been no sin, and the better part of wisdom, for the Court in Citizens United to have addressed as narrowly as possible the immediate issue (a nonprofit’s distribution and promotion of a political documentary), and then let the argument continue. Still better, it might have addressed the issue with the very intention of leaving space for that argument to continue.