Yet here we are. Clinton has not closed the sale with Democratic voters. Her campaign knows this — though they once wanted the Democratic National Committee to hold fewer debates, they’ve now flip-flopped and decided that more debates will provide the former secretary the best venue to keep making her case. Meanwhile, the past few months have seen an explosion in fruitful debates among liberals: how to build on Obamacare, how to address income inequality, how to approach foreign policy after Obama, how to fix the criminal justice system and how to break the partisan gridlock in Washington.

In short, this race is just getting good, and yet if Clinton wins Iowa, it could effectively end Monday. Sanders likely will still win New Hampshire, but Clinton will romp through other states. Voters and the media will pull back from treating the race as a real debate. This essential discussion for the future of liberalism will get cut short in its prime.

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Iowa voters must make sure this necessary debate continues.

Clinton has not closed the sale because she hasn’t answered key questions about her candidacy. As of Saturday, Sanders polls better nationally than her against Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. (Some say this is just because the GOP hasn’t demonized Sanders as a “socialist.” Swap Sanders and “socialist” with Obama and “inexperienced” and you have what people said in early 2008.) Even Clinton supporters admit that she will likely struggle to turn out the younger voters essential to replicating Obama’s two victories. The email scandal looks set to hang over her candidacy for the rest of the election. Whether or not she is legally vulnerable does not affect the political liability; that she, in explaining her use of a private email server, put her own “convenience” as a higher priority than transparency and national security is inexcusable — a decision that voters are quite right to be concerned about.

Clinton’s policies rightly also give many Democrats pause. The evidence suggests that Clinton will lean towards the hawkishness that has ensnared the United States in its most costly and mistaken wars of the past half-century. On financial policy, the country remains woefully unprepared for the next financial crisis, and firms are still able to get away with fraud and other dangerous activities with impunity; Clinton has only half-heartedly gestured towards further fixes, and she is the favored candidate (among Democrats) of interests who oppose such changes. On inequality, Clinton’s proposals pale next to Sanders’s. On trade policy, Clinton does now oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its dubious provisions, but she only flip-flopped to that during the campaign, and her record suggests her skepticism about questionable deals like the TPP is at best very shaky. And on health care, Clinton has sadly opted to emphasize misleading scare tactics about Sanders’s plan rather than her ways to improve on Obamacare.

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Then there is the question of how to get anything passed in Washington given the nigh-intractable partisan gridlock. Whoever is elected president will have to overcome what appears to be an unbreakable GOP advantage in Congress. There are two ways to deal with the situation: Either a gambit on extending the turnout model that has fueled the Obama presidency to break the gridlock and elect more Democrats, or a resignation to the state of play and a resolve to put “points on the board” through small legislative victories and temporary executive actions. (The judicial system, especially Supreme Court appointments, is a wash between Sanders and Clinton; liberal justices will be appointed whoever wins.) Points on the board is an appealing strategy and a defensible one, but when the past two Democratic presidents tried it, Obama got nothing except more GOP opposition and Bill Clinton ended up with little more than a terrible deal on welfare reform. The Democrats’ best electoral and policy results in the past 20 years have been when the party turns out people who normally would not come out and when President Obama disregarded the advice of moderates and the establishment and pushed forward with Obamacare.

This is not an endorsement of Sanders; he is not a perfect candidate. His health-care plan is disappointingly ignorant about how single-payer systems work in other countries. Too often he falls back on describing non-class issues such as racism in purely economic terms. If a terrorist attack turns 2016 into a national security election, he would struggle mightily. There is a strong argument that he’d be worse electorally for the Democrats than Clinton. And having a woman in the White House would have tremendous policy and symbolic value.

But liberals should stop and look at what each candidate aims at. Sanders pushes for an America where health care is universal, where we return to really trying to stop the next financial crisis, where politicians offer more than half-measures to fight inequality, where leaders don’t pretend they can take hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy interests and then make decisions entirely unaffected by their lobbying. Clinton does not. It’s easy to pretend that this doesn’t matter, that it’s about the “points on the board,” that somehow perpetuating a government that is clearly more receptive to the interests of the rich and the powerful than other Americans is a wise strategy to push when liberals’ entire turnout struggle is getting people already disenchanted with politics to turn out.

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