If we could tell you where things will stand in November, we damn sure wouldn't be editing a magazine.

But we do know this: 2016 is the election when Silicon Valley—its players, its policy priorities, and, oh yes, its money—finally upstages the old 20th-­century power structure and seizes control of the political game.

Of course, tech has been shifting the terrain in ways large and small for a while now. Where would a candidate's op-research/rapid-­response team be without analytics apps? What might have happened if that video of Mitt Romney's "47 percent" had never shown up? And then, of course, there's Barack Obama. Eight years ago, he harnessed data tracking and social media to fuel a next-­generation political machine that rewrote the rules of campaigning and rocketed him to the White House. Since then, every politician has learned what every startup knows in its bones: You live and die by software.