Hillary Clinton’s new campaign memoir, What Happened, has poked the festering wounds in the Democratic Party, but should also force a reckoning with her political legacy. Some pundits have said that because of her historic defeat to Donald Trump—and, eight years earlier, to Barack Obama—her impact was minor. “Hillary Clinton is a footnote in history,” Glenn Thrush declared in Politico right after the election. “Clinton will forever be known as one of the worst closers in political history, a woman who was never capable of selling a wary public on herself, on account of her own shortcomings and paranoia or perhaps as a result of a sexism so ingrained in American culture that women as well as men suffered from it.” Presidential historian H.W. Brands agrees, recently telling the Columbia Journalism Review, “If I write about the 2016 election ten years from now, I’ll spend a lot of time on Donald Trump and only a tiny bit on Hillary Clinton. If I get into detail, I’ll say that the email questions, the FBI’s timing, feminist fatigue, and the like simply highlighted her central weakness.”

These dismissive judgments aren’t just wrong, but betray a fundamentally flawed view of what’s important in politics. By their logic, only winning matters; only those who reach the White House leave a legacy. In his capacity as a historian, Brands has criticized this mentality, noting in a 2012 lecture, “We have a cult of the president, where we make too big a deal of the president.” Political history is made by all sorts people, of course—businesspeople, generals, intellectuals, activists, members of Congress, and, yes, sometimes losers. Clinton’s lifetime of political achievements and failures ensure that she’ll be anything but a historical footnote.

Some of the biggest political legacies have been left by losing presidential candidates. William Jennings Bryan never became president, losing three elections as the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Yet Bryan is better remembered than the two candidates who defeated him, William McKinley and William Howard Taft. It was Bryan who made populism a force in national politics, laying the groundwork for the progressive agenda that the Democrats would pursue through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and future leaders. According to Georgetown historian Michael Kazin’s 2006 biography A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, the battles Bryan fought in 1896 “set the Democrats on a course that led away from their laissez-faire past and toward the liberalism of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society. To demand that government control the money supply, tax the rich, and defend the right to strike was not quite a blueprint for the regulatory state. But the platform officially declared that Democrats were in favor of beginning to redistribute wealth and power in America. In rhetoric at least, the party has never gone back.” To the extent that Democrats have embraced economic populism, Bryan continues to have a permanent legacy. (Bryan is also remembered for a less favorable reason: He was the evolution-denying prosecutor in the famous Scopes Trial.)

Two of the biggest political losers in American history were Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972, yet both candidates were enormously transformative. Goldwater initiated the takeover of the Republican Party by the conservative movement, and pioneered the use of racist dog whistles that have characterized Republican politics to this day. McGovern, famously caricatured as the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” made social liberalism one of the pillars of the Democratic Party. He actively courted feminist voters, campaigning on increasing the participation of women (and minorities) in the party. In 1968, women made up just 13 of delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Thanks to changes pushed by the McGovern campaign, that number reached 40 percent in 1972. While the measure to include gays rights in the platform failed that year, McGovern stated that he considered it a civil rights issue, a first for a presidential candidate.

Before McGovern, there were many socially liberal Republicans (like the married-and-divorced Nelson Rockefeller and birth control activist Margaret Sanger) and socially conservative Democrats (anti-abortion Democrats were numerous enough that McGovern had to accept one, Senator Thomas Eagleton, as his running mate). After him, the two parties began sorting themselves along social liberal lines: the Democrats becoming the home of pro-choice feminist and LGBT activists, while the Republicans became the party of the religious right. McGovern was one of the key figures in setting the Democrats on their path.