Tuesday’s elections may be written into history as a setback for Clean Elections, but college students should hope its debut run does not end up being a death knell for publicly funded campaigns in the State of Massachusetts. After Warren Tolman, Clean Elections’ poster boy, was derided for using public money to finance negative advertisements and lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for governor, the Statehouse’s Clean Elections opponents will have ample ammo for their fight against the initiative.

Clean Elections, passed by statewide referendum in 1998, restricts donors to giving only $100 to each candidate. Statehouse Speaker Tom Finneran, who has been outspoken against the law, led the law’s opponents in the state’s legislative body to partially deny the initiative funding shortly after its passage.

But there are several reasons Warren Tolman’s fourth place finish in Tuesday’s primary should not determine the fate of Clean Elections. First, the race was only a primary election for statewide office, usually not a race that generates wide-scale interest in an off-year election. Secondly, Tolman lacks a strong enough resumé for the state’s most important elected office, though he is a promising politician. His campaign was centered on the fact that he was a Clean Elections candidate, rather than his ideas for solving the state’s problems. Tolman’s gubernatorial campaign only proved that regardless of a candidate’s electoral morality, he or she still has to have new and innovative ideas to win elections.

However, Tolman’s campaign can be considered encouraging for all proponents of fairer elections, and especially college students. Because of the law’s restrictions, Tolman was forced to resort to more grassroots tactics to attract voters. Instead of relying on impersonal television advertisements, his campaign centered much more on personally convincing voters of his merits.

With Clean Elections, college students, who were all but written off by Shannon O’Brien, Thomas Birmingham and Robert Reich in this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, could expect to be at least nominally courted by all candidates. College students are a sizable group of potential voters in Massachusetts, which would become more important with the level playing field Clean Elections would provide.

Unfortunately, until Clean Elections is a law that all candidates are forced to abide by, it will not succeed the way its proponents envision. As long as some candidates are allowed to use unrestricted cash donations, those who are forced to limit individual campaign contributions will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Many questions remain for the future of Clean Elections. Should candidates be allowed to use taxpayers’ money for negative advertisements? Will the law ever gain the popularity needed to make it universally applied and accepted?

But the point of Clean Elections law is to level the electoral playing field, forcing voters to choose between candidates based on the issues of campaigns and their personal merits, rather than their ability to raise funds and get their faces on TV. It deserves continued exploration and improvement, despite its seeming failures in Tuesday’s elections. Its benefits are far too important to let the law slip into oblivion.