“In Trump you’ve got a candidate who appears to be able to take on Cruz among Cruz’ strength voters, who are evangelicals and also to take on Kasich and Marco among more mainstream voters,” says Neil Newhouse, the chief pollster in 2012 for Mitt Romney. “That is going to make him tough to beat.”

John Brabender, the chief strategist for Rick Santorum’s campaign in 2012, adds:

“It speaks to the complexity of Donald Trump. I saw a poll out today, which had him leading in Texas, one leading in Florida, and one leading in Massachusetts. There’s an absurdity in that. You should not have a presidential candidate leading in all three of those states because the voting universes are so different.”

With that profile, Trump is poised to bridge a geographic and demographic divide that stymied the party’s past two presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney. The 11 states allocating delegates this year on Super Tuesday did not vote at the same time in 2012 or 2008. But in 2012, Romney won the mostly white-collar states voting next week on Super Tuesday (Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia) while losing most of the heavily evangelical Southern states (Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee) to Rick Santorum, and Georgia to Newt Gingrich. (Romney carried Arkansas and Texas, which voted only after he had effectively clinched the nomination). In 2008, John McCain and Romney split the white-collar states voting next Tuesday while Mike Huckabee captured Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia across the South.

This clear geographic divide reflected the demographic patterns of allegiance that drove the 2008 and 2012 races. Both McCain and Romney ran better among voters who were more centrist, and were not evangelicals. Each man followed a remarkably similar formula for victory: both carried about half of voters who were not evangelicals and about one-third of those who were, according to cumulative analyses of all the 2008 and 2012 exit polls conducted by the ABC pollster Gary Langer. As a result, both McCain and Romney ran well in states with few evangelicals, but struggled in those with more.

Trump is crossing the geographic divide that Romney and McCain could not because his coalition does not follow along the same demographic lines that shaped their races—and indeed most earlier Republican presidential contests. Trump has displayed remarkably consistent support from voters across the GOP’s ideological spectrum, and has also run about as well among voters who are evangelicals as those who are not.

Trump has replaced these historic fissures with a new divide based on education. Particularly over the past three contests, Trump has established a dominant advantage among Republicans without a college degree: Exit polls showed that compared to his next closet rival, white voters without a four-year college degree preferred him by a margin of 29 percentage points in New Hampshire, 18 points in South Carolina and 29 points in Nevada. Trump hasn’t run as well among white college-educated voters, but no one has consolidated nearly as much support among that group as Trump has coalesced among what he called in his Nevada victory speech “the poorly educated.”