Beginning in January, the regime’s Guardian Council began purging any candidates who espoused the slightest deviation from the country’s septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Candidates who favored releasing political prisoners — including the leaders of the Green Movement that many Iranians feel won the 2009 presidential elections — were disqualified. Even members of the Assembly of Experts, who had previously passed the vetting process, were disqualified. So too was the grandson of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To paraphrase a former top U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks, Wendy Sherman, Iranians on Friday will have a choice between hardliners and hard hardliners.

This counts as a failure of U.S. policy. To be sure, Obama has said repeatedly that the Iran nuclear deal does not depend on changes in the nature of the regime. But nonetheless, he sought to empower Rouhani’s moderates against the supreme leader and his hardliners.

This administration policy began almost as soon as Rouhani himself was elected. After he won the presidency in June 2013, the Treasury Department paused the process for blacklisting front companies and other Iranian concerns targeted by sanctions.