The votes in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary were still being counted when Elizabeth Warren took the stage at a sports center in Manchester to address her supporters.

She began by commending her rivals Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg on what was shaping up to be a good night for both. She praised Amy Klobuchar “for showing just how wrong the pundits can be when they count a woman out”.

It was not the election night speech Warren ever expected to give when she entered the presidential race more than a year ago. For months she was in contention to win the critical primary, where voters have known her since she first ran for Senate in 2012 in the neighboring state of Massachusetts.

“Let’s face it,” Warren’s campaign wrote in a fundraising email to supporters on Wednesday. “Last night didn’t go the way we wanted it to go.”

More than a week after the chaos of Iowa eclipsed her third-place finish, Warren faded to a distant fourth in New Hampshire. She didn’t meet the threshold to earn delegates, and the dismal results raise questions about the sustainability of her presidential campaign.

She’s not the only former top-tier candidate who has underperformed. Joe Biden came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. But while the former vice-president has pinned his fortunes on a “firewall” of support among black voters in South Carolina, it is less clear where Warren goes next. Asked in a recent interview with NPR to name the first state she anticipates winning, Warren replied: “I just don’t frame it that way.”

Before the New Hampshire results, her campaign staff insisted Warren is still the candidate “with the highest potential ceiling of support”, and that the road to the Democratic nomination is a “fractured” and “drawn-out contest”.

On Tuesday night, Warren presented herself as a “consensus candidate” who could excite liberals without alienating more moderate voters. The alternative, she warned, was a “long, bitter rehash” of the divisions that tore the party apart in 2016.

“Harsh tactics might work if you’re willing to burn down the party, in order to be the last man standing,” she said.

Jaye Palazzo of Nevada, a supporter of Elizabeth Warren, cheers during the Nevada Democrats’ “First in the West” event at Bellagio Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph: David Becker/Getty Images

‘Nevada is a possibility’

Warren’s team is counting on its early organizational investment in the contests to come: a staff of more than 1,000 spread across 31 states, including in the major Super Tuesday battlegrounds. To sustain her campaign in the coming weeks, Warren will rely on a prodigious small-donor fundraising operation, an enthusiastic base of supporters, and relatively high favorability ratings.

“There are 57 contests and we’re talking about where she is after two – and two that very much demographically do not represent the bulk of the Democratic primary,” said Christina Reynolds, the vice-president of communications at the political action committee Emily’s List.

Reynolds noted that after Iowa, Warren all but disappeared from the national political conversation compared with Biden, who finished behind her in both contests.

“We’re still talking about his potential because there are other voters coming, that should apply to other candidates as well,” she said.

Democratic strategist Abe Rakov, most recently the campaign manager for the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s presidential bid, said Warren may have a good chance in Nevada, where she has a strong organization and remains close to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, an influential figure in the state.

Rakov said: “Nevada is a possibility. They’ve been working harder there than any other campaign.” But he offered the caveat that, like in Iowa and New Hampshire, “sometimes, hard work doesn’t pay off”.

In South Carolina, Clay Middleton, a Democratic National committeeman, said Warren has had a relatively light footprint in the state.

“I think her campaign put more stock into Iowa [and] New Hampshire than South Carolina, probably because they thought that Joe Biden had a lot of African American support,” said Middleton, who pegged her chances in the state as “not very good”.

But in a sign of her efforts to improve her standing with non-white voters, Middleton said he was invited by the Warren campaign to attend a political meeting of African American Democrats in the state on Friday.

Elizabeth Warren addresses supporters at a rally in New Hampshire. Photograph: Elise Amendola/Associated Press

‘She’s the one’

As Sanders rises and the moderates battle each other, Warren hopes to break through as the candidate best positioned to unite a party increasingly divided between ideological poles.

Many of Warren’s admirers are relatively sanguine about her standing. After more than a year of campaigning, the contest still holds the capacity to surprise. After all, they reason, one strong debate performance vaulted Klobuchar to the top of the race, while Biden’s durability all but evaporated in a matter of days.

“New Hampshire will not be the end for her,” said New Hampshire state representative Suzanne Vail, holding a Warren sign outside of a polling booth in Nashua on Tuesday. “No way. Not when there are still so many candidates left in the race and so many more contests to go.”

Several supporters also believed there was a double standard at work – that Warren, as one of the last remaining women in the race, is hurt by a fixation on electability and that she is held to a higher standard on policy, despite having an arsenal of plans to combat the climate crisis, break up big tech, cancel student loan debt and create a Medicare for All healthcare system.

Warren’s allies hope she will start to draw sharper distinctions with her rivals.

“Anybody who loves Bernie Sanders values should vote for Elizabeth Warren if they want to actually enact progressive policy,” said Adam Green, who leads the Progressive Change Campaign Committee which has endorsed Warren.

“It’s not a badge of pride to fight for the exact same issue for 30 years and lose,” he added in a veiled reference to Sanders, who was elected to Congress in 1990. “Elizabeth Warren came to Washington several years ago with one core priority, was told it couldn’t be done, and passed the crown jewel of Wall Street reform into law.”

After she finished her primary night speech Warren stayed for more than an hour, smiling, hugging and taking selfies with supporters who had lined up for a photo with the woman they still hoped would be their president.

Among them was, Paul Lagueux, who conceded that he was starting to worry about Warren’s path forward.

“A little bit, yes,” said Lagueux, 52, a New Hampshire resident. “But I know that she’s got the message, she’s got the attitude, she’s got the intelligence – she’s really the only one that can turn this country around.”