Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters on Super Tuesday after winning in Vermont, one of the few states where he defeated Hillary Clinton in that day’s primaries. Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty

All along, a romantic streak has suffused the Bernie Sanders campaign. Yesterday evening in London, seventy Sanders supporters marched past the night-lit Houses of Parliament, carrying a Bernie sign outlined in purple lights, calmly chanting, “Feel the Bern.” They were on their way to cast their votes in the international primary. Among them was Sanders’s nephew, Jacob Sanders, who works for a homeless charity in London. “I’d always been proud, but this is the first time it’s been like this,” he told Jim Waterson, of BuzzFeed, who also spoke to a young American woman who said that if Donald Trump won the election she might not be allowed back into the country. The happy demonstration in front of the Houses of Parliament seemed a fitting way for the Sanders movement to observe Super Tuesday, in its sweet expatriate longing for an America that is not, at present, real.

By the end of the night, that America seemed a little farther away, because the limits of Sanders’s coalition had become clearer. Across the South, he lost to Hillary Clinton by huge margins: forty-three per cent in Georgia, fifty-nine per cent in Alabama, thirty-two per cent in Texas, and twenty-nine per cent in Virginia. Among African-American voters, his defeat was overwhelming: nine out of ten in Alabama and Arkansas voted for Clinton, according to exit polls. Clinton has struggled to gain the support of white working-class voters this time, but she narrowly won the Appalachian counties of Virginia. In the most urban counties that voted last night—in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Boston—she won by big margins. Sanders dominated in Colorado, Minnesota, and his home state of Vermont, but these are also the Super Tuesday states that look most like his American Sweden. Once the final results were in, Clinton had won sixty-two per cent of the ballots cast by Democrats so far this primary season, and Sanders only thirty-seven per cent.

For all the certainty, inside and outside the Sanders campaign, that the generational energies of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements have been transferred to the Vermonter’s candidacy, the map of Sanders’s support doesn’t match the map of the contemporary left very well. It generally excludes cities, where economic inequality is the sharpest, and minority communities, where injustice is the deepest—the places, in other words, where Occupy and Black Lives Matter took hold. The narrowness of Sanders’s appeal, and particularly his failure to move minority voters, is the central flaw in his candidacy. But the romp in Minnesota—Lake Wobegon territory—also suggests the scale of his achievement. Improbably, Sanders has managed to ignite the dream of democratic socialism among the serene parts of the country. He has radicalized the above-average.

Whatever comes next, it will not be a Sanders nomination. David Marcus, of the left-wing magazine Dissent, argued this week that even in defeat the Sanders movement could pull the Party to the left, in an echo of the rightward direction that Republicans took after Barry Goldwater’s loss: “A new generation of liberal Democrats and radical activists is emerging,” Marcus wrote, “outspoken and willing to do what it needs to be heard.”

There is a touch more ambiguity than that. Sanders’s dream of radical change was not the same dream as everyone’s on the left, and the issues that the Vermonter raised most resoundingly—campaign-finance reform, truly universal health care, aggressive financial regulation, student debt—are no longer too far removed from the views of the median Democratic member of Congress. (They are, for instance, more or less the favored issues of Elizabeth Warren, probably the most influential figure in the Party.) Perhaps the revolution that Sanders imagined will expand. Perhaps it will be overshadowed by an emphasis on gender and racial identities, or diverted by new models of labor and work. Or, perhaps—maybe most likely of all—the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton will simply swallow it whole.