As the votes were being counted in Nevada on Saturday afternoon, Bernie Sanders was appearing before a large and enthusiastic crowd in El Paso, Texas, which is one of the states that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3rd. After introducing his wife, Jane, as “the next First Lady of the United States,” Sanders called out some people in the crowd, including Jim Hightower, the veteran liberal activist, who served as the Texas commissioner of agriculture back in the nineteen-eighties. Like Sanders himself, Hightower is something of a legend in progressive circles, and the Vermont senator hailed him as a close friend of thirty years.

Over the decades, Hightower has supported a number of insurgent candidates for President, including Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, and Sanders himself, in 2016. In all that time, he has never backed a confirmed front-runner—until now, that is. For as Sanders slipped into his stump speech, during which he described Donald Trump as “a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, and a religious bigot,” he appeared to be racking up a victory in Nevada that was so large and comprehensive it made him the firm favorite to win the Democratic nomination—and raised the question of when, rather than whether, some of his moderate rivals will drop out.

Shortly after 7 P.M. E.S.T., news outlets projected Sanders as the winner in Nevada. The early returns from the caucus precincts showed him getting more than a third of the first preferences, and, after the reallocation of second preferences, more than forty per cent of the vote—while most of his rivals struggled to reach the fifteen-per-cent threshold that they had to pass to get any delegates at all. If this pattern held through the final returns, Sanders would be allocated the vast majority of the state’s thirty-six pledged delegates.

As I noted in a recent post, this dynamic—Sanders getting a healthy plurality of the vote while his rivals divide the rest—is a recipe for him racking up a massive lead in delegates on Super Tuesday, which is just ten days away. By Saturday night, the online betting and prediction markets were putting his chances at getting the nomination at more than fifty per cent. Of course, this is just a snapshot, and things could change. But in some Democratic circles the talk was about whether anything could be done to stop him. Unless at least some of his rivals drop out quickly, the answer may be no. Even if some candidates were to quit, Sanders would still be in a strong position.

Of all the Democratic candidates, Sanders has always counted on the biggest and most enthusiastic grassroots movement, and his appeal appears to be growing. In Nevada, his victory was impressive pretty much however you diced the electorate, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Media Research for news outlets, which was based on a large sample. Sanders was expected to do very well among young voters, but the scale of his lead in this demographic was something to behold. In the under-thirty age group, he got sixty-six per cent of the vote; in the under-forty-five group, he got forty-eight per cent. No other candidate got more than seventeen per cent of the vote in either of these demographics.

Just over half of the caucusgoers were women, according to the entrance poll. Sanders won thirty per cent of their vote, while Joe Biden got sixteen per cent, and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar got fourteen and twelve per cent, respectively. Among men, Sanders did even better, earning thirty-eight per cent of the vote, way ahead of Buttigieg, with sixteen per cent, and Biden, with fifteen per cent.

The entrance poll also illustrated the importance of Latinos, who made up about a fifth of voters. According to the entrance poll, Sanders got more half of the vote—fifty-three per cent—while Biden got just sixteen per cent. This success reflected an extensive effort by the Sanders campaign to reach out to Hispanic voters, and it augurs well for his prospects in other states with large Latino populations.

The caucusgoers were pretty evenly split between college-educated voters and non-college voters. Sanders finished with a big lead in both categories. He even came out ahead among college-educated women, a group with which he has been struggling, according to some opinion polls.

Some moderate Democrats may be tempted to console themselves into thinking that Nevada, as a caucus state, drew voters who skewed to the left. But the entrance poll suggested that the electorate was nearly evenly split between people who identified as “very liberal” (thirty per cent), “somewhat liberal” (thirty-five per cent), and “moderate or conservative” (thirty-four per cent). In all three ideological groups, Sanders got the biggest share of the vote, even among self-identified “moderate or conservative” voters. (The breakdown of the opinion poll showed that one reason Sanders did so well among moderates was that he got the vote of almost half of all Latino moderates.)

As the race moves on to South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states, there are big questions about the viability of all of the moderate candidates. Biden’s camp claimed a second-place finish in Nevada, but the results were not yet final, and Biden performed woefully among voters under forty-five. Tom Steyer, who spent heavily on advertising in the state, ran well behind in virtually every category. Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren all did very badly with minority voters, according to the entrance poll. Among Latino voters, Klobuchar got just four per cent, Warren seven per cent, and Buttigieg nine per cent. Among African-American voters, who made up roughly ten per cent of the voters, Klobuchar got the support of just three per cent and Buttigieg got two per cent.

With numbers like these, you would think there has to be a reckoning among the candidates who are now chasing Sanders. On Saturday night, there was no indication of any candidates dropping out—yet.