As we barrel toward Election Day, it’s clear political operatives need new playbooks. The political wishbone and wing-T formations of the past aren’t scoring with voters against the spread offenses and run-pass options they respond to these days. The old trick plays are either ineffective or already dead.

The fortunes of Tom Tancredo in Colorado and Cynthia Nixon in New York suggest to me the voters are seeing things differently.

Tancredo was a champion of battling sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants. Nixon championed universal rent control and single-payer health care. Neither did well. Tancredo dropped out of the governor’s race, partly because he saw he couldn’t raise the money to win, and stepped aside for Walker Stapleton.

When Tancredo got in the race last year, he thought the Republican electorate of 2018 would be something like the entrenched conservatives who elected Trump over immigration issues two years ago. He was wrong. Best known as Miranda on TV’s “Sex and the City,” Nixon could harness neither Trump’s celebrity momentum nor Bernie Sanders’ socialist democratic mojo.

The game is changing fast. As an unaffiliated voter who always turns out on Election Day, I’m accustomed to a pile of campaign junk mail, routine robo calls asking for my support and strangers at my Jeffco door. This time around I’ve had very few pieces of mail and no one has bothered to call or stop by.

The things that used to be effective are losing their might. Voters have seen too much. This election cycle put two campaign mainstays on life support: holding rallies and having the candidate speak to the press. Instead, they’ve relied on spokespeople and surrogates.

Here are a few old moves that belong on that endangered list:

The pot calling the kettle black: This nearly always means the pot is way, way blacker. It happens like this. You ask about something possibly less than positive that a candidate has said or done. Instead of nibbling on a slice of humble pie, the candidate’s people pick up the pan and throw it across the political aisle.

Let me offer only the most recent example. A couple weeks ago, Republican operatives presented me a stack of investments made by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis. The millionaire candidate vowing a crackdown on drug companies has invested in, what else, drug companies, at least eight of them.

Instead of explaining, the Polis people pivoted: Stapleton has invested in two drug companies, one of which is Kroger Co., the King Soopers parent that runs pharmacies in its stores. The other was sued in Virginia alongside Pharma Purdue, the opioid seller being sued in Colorado.

I read the lawsuit. Not only is a company Stapleton invested in being sued with Purdue in Virginia, so is another company that Polis invested in. That salvo had a boomerang.

Fighting back: No candidate runs, except maybe in Georgia, from the point of view of “I’m one mean cat,” but clean campaign pledges or not, that’s how things turn out sometimes, a means to an end.

Nobody ever owns up to throwing the first punch. If I call you a mangy goat who consorts with communists two seconds after I file my paperwork to run against you, it’s probably because you once cut me off in traffic and now I was forced to defend myself. The voters need to know goats shouldn’t drive to make an informed choice on Election Day.

Fake news: How do you know when you’ve got a story? When a campaign tries too hard to convince you it’s not a story. If it’s not a story, why do they care if I waste my time on it?

Guilt by association: If you ever had your picture taken with someone, or served on a board with strangers or arm-wrestled a loud mouth in a beer joint, you have a political liability waiting to come home.

And if that person donated to you in the past, you’re probably going to be called on to give that money back, even though doing that would be the admission of guilt your opponents are dreaming of. If politics was professional wrestling, this would be the sleeper hold, and it should be a foul.

Calling on you. Calling on someone in the other party to denounce something, or give back something or generally apologize, is pointless. They’re never going to do it. They should just say what they mean: I’m mad or behind in the polls, and I want somebody to pay attention.

The Twitter of things: That’s so 2016. It’s dead. Move on. Trump and the trolls have turned the once fun and informational platform into a minefield. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times characterized it as a video game for people with anger issues.

You can read along under #copolitics as essentially six people, and the four other accounts each of them operate, bicker with each other much of the workday.

A millennial Democratic operative told me recently this state of play of Twitter is democracy. That gave me one more reason to worry about democracy.