It’s time for some cold hard truths in this presidential election.

Here’s an ice cold one: winning a landslide victory in the mighty state of Vermont is not a foundation for success. Especially if Vermont has been your home since the Jurassic age of politics.

Here’s another: if you hold a victory rally before most of the states have been called, you’re not fooling anyone. When your victorious supporters have emptied the hall before the TV pundits have barely warmed up, you’re actually throwing a consolation party.

Bernie Sanders has built his impressively insurgent campaign on the premise that he’s a truth-teller. On Tuesday night, he repeated the commonplace belief that climate change is not a hoax (as many Republicans argue), and that the science is clear.

On that basis, it’s only a matter of time before Sanders stops perpetuating his own hoax and looks at the data of the delegate count.

Instead, on Super Tuesday the socialist senator spoke of an idyllic place where democracy is still as pure as the mountain snow that didn’t fall this year. It’s a Swiss-like canton where they have town meetings for citizens to make decisions in a democratic fashion. “In Vermont,” Sanders explained, “billionaires don’t buy town meetings.” Well, they would be strange billionaires if they did.

In a place called Vermont, you can stand in front of your cheering supporters and explain the glory of proportional delegate allocation: that a narrow victory doesn’t confer a big advantage in delegates. “By the end of tonight,” Sanders declared, “we are going to win many hundreds of delegates.”

But in a place called America, that doesn’t mean a whole lot if your rival is winning many hundreds more. Sure enough, despite Sanders claiming Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota, Clinton won lopsided victories across the south, enough to push her far into the lead.

Sanders’ willful refusal to accept reality – a questionable quality in a president – recalled the 2008 performance of one Hillary Clinton on the night when her main rival, an upstart by the name of Barack Obama, won enough delegates to put the race beyond her reach.

In a speech in her home state of New York, Clinton refused to concede to either the arithmetic or Obama, and instead urged her 18 million voters to tell her what she should do next on her website. At Camp Obama, they had a few ideas of their own.

It may be premature to expect Sanders to concede to reality. But it’s never too early for Hillary Clinton to pivot to the general election.

In her victory speech, she delivered the customary blows against Donald Trump: that America has never stopped being great, and that we should be breaking down barriers instead of building walls.

But the real pivot to the general election came in how Clinton name-checked every voting group that she needs to improve her tally in a contest against Trump. She talked about rust belt towns and Appalachian communities. She talked about union plumbers and auto workers rallying to support Flint, Michigan.

She lavished praise on Obama, decried voting rights suppression in North Carolina, and recalled a visit to a Baptist church. She called for equal pay for women, and a pay raise for the middle class.

You might just call her victory speech Clintonesque in its focus-grouped, precision-bombing approach to building a winning coalition in November. She didn’t just leave it to chance in choosing Miami for her victory rally.

If Hillary Clinton wanted to win with “love and kindness”, her likely rival in the fall was talking about destruction and winning. A little more than an hour’s drive north up I-95, Donald Trump admitted he had no idea what Clinton meant by wanting to make America whole again.

That may be because life is a hollow shell at Trump’s gold-painted Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. Once again, the likely GOP nominee told the story of a friend who stopped buying Caterpillar construction equipment in favor of Komatsu machines from Japan. This is a problem Trump can relate to, since he outsources work on his own fashion label to China and Mexico. Trump savored a consistent string of wins on Super Tuesday in a way that only he could pull off: with sheer head-spinning inconsistency. “Look, I’m a unifier,” Trump asserted before tearing into everyone else.

“Once we get all of this finished, I’m going to go after one person: Hillary Clinton,” he promised, as he turned his victory speech into a press conference.

Trump is a special kind of unifier. The kind who feels most whole when he wins and other people lose. Clinton may have finally put the Sanders threat behind her. Now she needs to prove that her version of love can beat Trump’s version of hate.