Barring some historic and unprecedented collapse, the US presidential election will be a heavyweight slugfest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: a contest between one candidate who says she wants to see more love and kindness, and another who says he wants to punch protesters in the face.

That’s not to say the primary rhetoric won’t persist for a while. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio will still hurl mud at Trump as they indulge in the fantasy of a brokered convention that could deny a man who has built his career on hurling mud and indulging fantasies.

Bernie Sanders will continue to talk about a revolution against the selfish and corrupt super-wealthy class while Democrats increasingly revel in Clinton’s attacks on a man who embodies the selfish and corrupt super-wealthy class. And we in the beloved media will do our very best to pretend this primary is real. Because: clicks and ratings.

But in reality Super Tuesday performed its traditional role: it confirmed the results of the early voting states, and set the frontrunners on a glide path to the nomination.

Those results are clear. Republican voters are in a revolutionary mood. They want more change, not less. They want an anti-establishment candidate who (frankly, my dear) doesn’t give a damn about credibility, consistency or conventional politics. Democratic voters want less change, not more. The minorities who are the bedrock of the party love President Obama and his record, but want a stronger and fairer economy. Above all, they want to stop the Republican extremism that has deadlocked the country for the last six years.

At this stage, all that matters is the delegate count – not momentum, nor the number of states won. To overcome the delegate leads of Trump and Clinton, their rivals need landslides, and lots of them. Winning a landslide victory in the mighty state of Vermont is not a foundation for success. Especially if – like Sanders – it has been your home since the Jurassic age of politics. And winning marginal victories elsewhere doesn’t count for much. If you add up all the delegate leads for Sanders in the four states he won yesterday, you find that Clinton pocketed more of a lead in the single state of Georgia – before we start counting super-delegates, who lean heavily towards her.

In today’s Republican party, the split wins are the best possible outcome for Trump, which perhaps explains his unctuous attempt to congratulate Ted Cruz for winning his home state of Texas. It is entirely in Trump’s interest to perpetuate the fraud that Cruz and Rubio should stay in the race and continue to divide opposition to Trump inside the GOP.

Not that their presence will make any difference to the final outcome. The Republican national committee stacked the deck by changing the delegate rules of later-voting states (after 15 March) from proportional allocation to a winner-takes-all system – Tthe idea being to prevent a Romney-like nominee from getting dragged into an extended fight with a Trump-like outsider.

It’s at about this time that supporters of the also-rans point to the states their candidates have won: surely Sanders winning in Colorado is a sign of his electability. Surely it doesn’t matter about Clinton’s victories in the south, where the Democrats never win in the general election.

With the Trump factor making this such an unpredictable year, it is hard to forecast what will happen in the general election. After several more months of freakout by the Republican establishment, it is possible that the Never-Trumpniks will stay at home rather than vote for someone they openly deride as a hate-mongering conman.

Take the reliably Republican state of Georgia, where demographic projections suggest that minorities will represent a majority of the state’s population in under a decade. Democrats haven’t won Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992, but now a Trump candidacy is leading to a reconsideration of the Republican lock.

“It would be competitive because certainly there’s a considerable amount of Republicans in Georgia, especially members of the business establishment, who would never support Trump,” says Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

“Whether or not they would actively work for Clinton, I don’t know. But there would be large defections from the usual Republican groups here in Georgia. The big unknown is whether Trump would attract people who haven’t voted in the recent past: Democrats and independents.”

Those disaffected voters are the blue-collar workers who have been screwed by economic upheaval caused by global trade and new technology. They were Reagan Democrats and are now attracted to the anti-trade message of both Trump and Sanders.

Which helps explain why Clinton delivered a victory speech that was light on Trump-bashing. Pivoting to the general election, she namechecked every voting group that she needs to improve her tally in a contest against Trump. Trump could savour a consistent string of wins on Super Tuesday in a way that only he could pull off: 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. “They are declaring Marco Rubio the big loser of the night,” he continued.

Trump is a special kind of unifier – the kind who feels most whole when he wins and other people lose. “I feel awfully good,” he told the media. Meanwhile, the rest of the Republican party felt just awful.