The scale of Alex Salmond's triumph in the Scottish elections is already dramatic. With 82 of the 129 seats declared, the first minister is on the brink of forming Scotland's first majority government at Holyrood.

Labour has endured its worst performance in Scotland since 1931, with many of the party's best-known and most experienced figures routed by Salmond's Scottish National party, while the Tories have suffered their worst result ever.

The Liberal Democrats have been ruthlessly punished by the Scottish electorate for their coalition with the Tories at Westminster and, according to BBC forecasts, are likely to lose 10 of their 16 seats.

But the cold, hard figures still suggest this is about domestic politics for the majority of Scottish voters. It is about the question of who administers their devolved government, about governing Scotland rather than ripping up the constitution.

Salmond may yet just fall short of the magical 65 seats he needs to win outright – his advisers are cooling expectations and taking of 60 seats being their "ceiling".

But even with 60, he should enjoy an unexpectedly clear run at staging the referendum on independence. This, however, is not a cataclysm for the United Kingdom or a constitutional crisis. Not yet.

Salmond knows the Scottish electorate is not pro-independence. Not yet. The series of polls during the Holyrood campaign which gave the SNP a 10-point lead over Labour also repeatedly showed that popular support for independence remained on or around 30%, reaching 35% in late April.

Some pollsters also asked voters to give their voting preferences for Westminster: those results showed Labour still substantially ahead.

A YouGov poll carried out for the Scotsman newspaper in late April put Labour at 43% against the SNP at 30%, figures that were reversed on the Holyrood vote. The same people questioned by YouGov put the SNP at 45% on the constituency vote and 39% on the list, coming very close to the figures the party actually commanded in the election.

Salmond is keenly aware of this. He has repeatedly made clear that he knew hundreds of thousands of Scots who had never voted SNP were being attracted to the party – not because of nationalism, but because of its competence in government since 2007, its optimistic message and its "big tent" appeal to both centre-left social democrats and Tory business leaders.

He accomplished an extraordinary feat in this campaign, managing to win the endorsement of millionaire executives such as David Murray, the unionist owner of Rangers football club, and Martin Gilbert, the head of the global investment bank Aberdeen Asset Management, a firm with £180bn in funds.

Standing alongside them in backing Salmond was the disgraced socialist leader Tommy Sheridan and Tommy Brennan, the trade unionist and works convenor at the former Ravenscraig steel works – one of the most totemic workplaces in Scottish labour movement history.

In doing so, the SNP won seats in areas in which it had barely campaigned, such as the Tory held Edinburgh Pentlands and Lib Dem-held Edinburgh Western, and in some places coming from fourth place to win.

It snatched seats in Lanarkshire, along the Clyde and in Glasgow, and now controls Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

There are other significant facts to consider. One analysis by the BBC found that Labour's vote in the constituencies had barely fallen, dropping by a mere 0.6%.

And the Holyrood elections appear at this stage – with fewer than 50 seats yet to declare – to have been decided by about 50% of the Scottish electorate, some two million people.

The 2007 election was decided by 52% of Scottish voters. In comparison, last year's substantial victory for Labour at the 2010 general election, when it held all 41 of its Westminster seats with 42% of the vote while the SNP was reduced to six with 20% of the vote, was based on a turnout of 64%.

Scottish voters traditionally behave differently in domestic Holyrood elections than in Westminster elections.

But for his shell-shocked opponents, particularly Labour, the truly frightening outcome of Salmond's success is the complete command he now has of the Scottish parliament, and with it, his party's destiny.

He can now rewrite public policy in Scotland and demand greater economic freedoms for Holyrood from David Cameron's government. Cameron and his humiliated deputy, Nick Clegg, might yet allow Scotland to set its own corporation tax and might double Holyrood's borrowing powers to £5bn.

Before Salmond stages his referendum in three or four years time, the SNP is likely to have introduced minimum pricing on alcohol, reduced Scotland's eight police forces down to three or even one, frozen the council tax for another five years and built new roads and bridges.

All with one goal in mind – the sole intention of converting those new, first time SNP voters on Thursday into permanent supporters, people who might feel far more confident about Scotland's capacity to survive outside the UK. People who might yet vote yes to independence.