Super Tuesday was not the electric showing many fans of Bernie Sanders had hoped for. While some early projections forecast he would win as many as eight out of 14 states and amass a significant lead in pledged delegates, voters delivered a more modest outcome. Mr. Sanders won four states, including delegate-rich California, and ended the night nearly tied with Joe Biden in total pledged delegates. Most worrying for Mr. Sanders’s campaign, the hoped-for youth turnout did not materialize, while Mr. Biden enjoyed the kind of suburban surge that handed Democrats the 2018 midterms.

Still, it isn’t over for Mr. Sanders. Super Tuesday does not reverse his victories in the earlier primaries, and Nevada in particular bodes well for his appeal among Latino voters, who are a key demographic in several undecided states. More than half of the delegates who will determine the outcome of the party’s convention in July are still up for grabs. Mr. Biden’s big night came after an almost panicked flurry of consolidation around him, including dropout endorsements from Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, as well as an assist in Texas from his former primary opponent Beto O’Rourke.

The express purpose of those 11th-hour efforts was to slow Mr. Sanders’s momentum on Super Tuesday, and it worked — but the gambit is exhausted now. Elizabeth Warren, who had an even more dispiriting night, has also dropped out, and many of her supporters seem primed to turn to Mr. Sanders. And the map ahead could prove friendlier to Mr. Sanders, with Biden-friendly Southern states mostly spoken for.

Still, Mr. Sanders’s campaign should not rest its hopes on dropouts, delegate maps or sudden turns of fortune. There is much for it to do if it hopes to sew up the gap between Mr. Sanders’s delegate count and Mr. Biden’s, and then to exceed it with margins that will push thoughts of a brokered convention to remote recesses of establishment minds. It seems to me that Mr. Sanders will have to overcome his reluctance to go on the attack, and to condemn Mr. Biden emphatically for his political record (encouragingly, Mr. Sanders does appear prepared to take up that line) and for corruption and impropriety. But perhaps more important, the Sanders campaign must set its sights on the kinds of voters who turned out for Mr. Biden on Tuesday night — anxious suburbanites wearied by the tumult of the Trump years.