The mood at Michael Bloomberg’s final campaign stop, held on Tuesday evening, was celebratory. The campaign had characterized it as an “organizing event,” but inside the Palm Beach County Convention Center, in Florida, it felt more like a rock concert, with indigo lighting, a stadium-worthy sound system, and hundreds of enthusiastic attendees crowded up against the stage, cheering and waving American flags. Tension had been building throughout the day, as Bloomberg raced across the state between campaign stops, and results from some of the fourteen Democratic primaries and caucuses being held on Super Tuesday started to come in. By around eight o’clock in the evening, the former Vice-President Joe Biden had already been declared the winner in Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia—a state where Bloomberg had hoped to do well. Bloomberg’s decision to enter the Presidential race, back in November, had been based on a theory that Biden was failing to gain momentum, leaving the Democrats without an establishment-friendly candidate to challenge Bernie Sanders, whom some Party leaders fear cannot win in a national race against Donald Trump. Suddenly, in the past thirty-six hours, everything had changed. Biden now looked like a favorite, Sanders was not doing as well as he could have, and Bloomberg was in a position to hurt the very cause that he purported to be helping, by siphoning critical moderate votes away from Biden. By sundown, Bloomberg risked being compared to Ralph Nader, who ran as a Green Party candidate in 2000 and was blamed by some for costing Al Gore the Presidency.

For a few final hours, though, all of that was put aside, and the fantasy atmosphere of a victory celebration took hold. Bloomberg was introduced by Robert Buckhorn, the former mayor of Tampa, who spoke in soaring terms about unity (“It doesn’t matter how you got here. It doesn’t matter the language that you speak. It doesn’t matter the gods you love. It doesn’t matter who you love. . . . We are all in this together”), and Keith James, the mayor of West Palm Beach (“This is a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation opportunity coming up!”), followed by Judge Judy Sheindlin, the television personality, who arrived in a bright blue suit (“This is the greatest country in the world! It doesn’t need a revolution. It may need a little tweaking”).

Bloomberg finally came out onstage, to the U2 song “It’s A Beautiful Day,” and took his position behind the podium. He looked startled, or pleasantly surprised, at the size and enthusiasm of the crowd, and pivoted back and forth, taking it all in with a half smile on his face. “My message is simple,” he finally said. He was running “to start rebuilding our country, and to start getting things done. And I mean big important things, like stopping gun violence, and fighting climate change, and finally achieving affordable health coverage for all Americans. This is a campaign for change, for honesty, for inclusion . . . and a campaign for human decency. And this is a campaign to bring our country back together.” The only hint of anything less than defiance came in a line that Bloomberg uttered, almost plaintively, partway into his prepared remarks: “No matter how many delegates we win tonight, we have done something no one thought was possible. In just three months, we’ve gone from one per cent in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination for President.”

The departing supporters seemed giddy. Three women I spoke with in the lobby of the convention center, all members of the Atlantis Democratic Club, in Palm Beach County, were smiling and holding flags. “I’m tired of hearing talk. I want to hear experience. I want to hear somebody who can get it done,” one of them, Thais Villanueva, told me. She said that the most important issues to her were gun control, climate change, immigration, and reproductive rights. When I asked whether she had contemplated the possibility that Bloomberg would drop out soon, Villanueva shook her head as if she didn’t want to hear of it. “I heard him say, ‘Are you asking Biden that question?’ ” she said, referring to Bloomberg. “He’s a smart guy. He’s in it for a win. He’s going to wait to see the results from today.”

Later in the evening, in a statement, Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, repeated Bloomberg’s lines about having gone from one-per-cent support to becoming a contender. He added, “Our No. 1 priority remains defeating Donald Trump.” There was, notably, no reference to beating Trump as a Presidential opponent, only the promise, which Bloomberg had made from the beginning, that he would commit whatever resources he had to saving the country from a second Trump term. Just after ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, Bloomberg officially withdrew from the race, putting an end to one of the most rushed and costly experiments in American politics.

Bloomberg outspent his rivals by magnitudes; estimates put the price tag of his campaign at more than five hundred million dollars, all expended in around a hundred days, much of it on television ads, mailers, twenty-four hundred staff members in states across the country, and the seeding of a political-data and polling unit called Hawkfish. The vastness and efficiency of his campaign organization is a testament not only to the fortune he had to spend but also to his effectiveness at running an organization. The stunning collapse of the campaign before it even got going suggests, somewhat reassuringly, that buying one’s way to the Presidency isn’t quite as straightforward as some of his opponents and their supporters had feared. There is clearly more to the enterprise than management skills and capital.

Despite the humbling comedown, the events of the past few days leave Bloomberg in a position to exert influence over what comes next. He has the resources to play an important role in the campaign to unseat Trump, which he says he plans to continue pursuing. Although the Sanders campaign stated that it would not accept any financial assistance from Bloomberg, the former mayor has said that he will support Sanders if he ends up becoming the Democratic nominee. (“I would vote for Sanders, but I would not be happy doing it,” he said on Monday.) Bloomberg endorsed Biden on Wednesday, saying, “I will work to make him the next President of the United States.”

Bloomberg as a Presidential candidate was not charismatic or warm, and he didn’t seem to care; he brought an unflappable, no-nonsense approach to what is normally an emotional and chaotic process, but it didn’t always help him. When confronted with serious questions about discriminatory policing policies that he promoted as the mayor of New York City, and allegations of sexism and harassment at his company, he behaved as if he could half-apologize and change the subject. His lack of empathy for certain people was too obvious.

But, during a town-hall event hosted by Fox News, at George Mason University, on Monday night, another side of him came into view. Bloomberg had already answered questions from audience members and from the hosts, Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier—about his possible path to victory, how he would respond to the coronavirus, and whether or not he was “a real Democrat”—when there was an outburst in the audience. A number of gun-rights advocates wearing orange caps or T-shirts that said “Guns Save Lives” on them started challenging Bloomberg about his signature issue, his support for restrictions on gun ownership; the exchange turned into a burst of angry shouting across the room, most of it critical of Bloomberg. Three other men jumped out of their seats holding up white signs, interrupting the gun advocates, and surrounded the stage. They shouted “Stop and Frisk is wrong!” and yelled for Bloomberg to release women who had sued his company for discrimination from nondisclosure agreements. The moderators cut to a commercial break, and the protesters were escorted out, although the gun advocates and their hecklers soon began shouting at each other again. Then women spread throughout the audience started clapping in support of the candidate; they appeared to be affiliated with the gun-control movement that Bloomberg had started after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, in which twenty-one first-grade children and five adults were killed. Their clapping and cheering drowned out the gun-rights supporters, and a woman stood up. “He is a hero,” she said. “He’s saving our children!”